Glossary of Concepts

Abstract systems: symbolic tokens and expert systems taken generically.

Basic trust: trust in the continuity of others and in the object-world, derived from early infantile experience.

Bodily demeanour: the stylised conduct of the individual within the contexts of day-to-day life, involving the use of appearance to create specific impressions of self.

Collage effect: the juxtaposition of heterogeneous items of knowledge or information in a text or format of electronic communication.

Colonisation of the future: the creation of territories of future possibilities, reclaimed by counterfactual inference.

Deskilling of day-to-day life: the process whereby local skills are expropriated into abstract systems and reorganised in light of technical knowledge. Deskilling normally goes along with complementary processes of reappropriation.

Dialectic of the local and global: the oppositional interplay between local involvements and globalising tendencies.

Disembedding: the lifting out of social relationships from local contexts and their recombination across indefinite time/space distances.

Emancipatory politics: the politics of freedom from exploitation, inequality or oppression.

Existential contradiction: the contradictory relation of human beings to nature, as finite creatures who are part of the organic world, yet set off against it.

Existential questions: queries about basic dimensions of existence, in respect of human life as well as the material world, which all human beings `answer' in the contexts of their day-to-day conduct.

-- 243 --

Expert systems: systems of expert knowledge, of any type, depending on rules of procedure transferable from individual to individual.

Extrinsic criteria: influences on social relations or social life not governed by the institutional reflexivity of modernity.

Fateful moments: moments at which consequential decisions have to be taken or courses of action initiated.

High-consequence risks: risks which are pervasively consequential in terms of their implications for very large numbers of people.

High (or late) modernity: the current phase of development of modern institutions, marked by the radicalising and globalising of basic traits of modernity.

Historicity: the use of history to make history, a fundamental aspect of the institutional reflexivity of modernity.

Institutional reflexivity: the reflexivity of modernity, involving the routine incorporation of new knowledge or information into environments of action that are thereby reconstituted or reorganised.

Internal referentiality: the circumstance whereby social relations, or aspects of the natural world, become organised reflexively in terms of internal criteria.

Life-planning: the strategic adoption of lifestyle options, organised in terms of the individual's projected lifespan, and normally focused through the notion of risk.

Life politics: the politics of self actualisation, in the context of the dialectic of the local and global and the emergence of the internally referential systems of modernity.

Lifestyle sector: a time/space `slice' of an individual's overall activities, within which a fairly consistent set of social practices is followed.

Mediated experience: the involvement of temporally/spatially distant influences with human sensory experience.

Narrative of the self: the story or stories by means of which self-identity is reflexively understood, both by the individual concerned and by others.

Ontological security: a sense of continuity and order in events, including those not directly within the perceptual environment of the individual.

Open human control: future-oriented human intervention in the social and natural worlds, in which colonising processes are regulated by risk assessment.

-- 244 --

Place as phantasmagoric: the process whereby local characteristics of place are thoroughly invaded by, and reorganised in terms of, distanciated social relations.

Privatising of passion: the contracting of passion to the sexual sphere and the separation of that sphere from the public gaze.

Protective cocoon: the defensive protection which filters out potential dangers impinging from the external world and which is founded psychologically upon basic trust.

Pure relationship: a social relation which is internally referential, that is, depends fundamentally on satisfactions or rewards generic to that relation itself.

Reflexive project of the self: the process whereby self-identity is constituted by the reflexive ordering of self-narratives.

Regimes: regularised modes of behaviour relevant to the continuance or cultivation of bodily traits.

Risk culture: a fundamental cultural aspect of modernity, in which awareness of risk forms a medium of colonising the future.

Risk profiling: the portrayal of clusters of risks, in given environments of action, in the light of current circumstances of technical knowledge.

Self-identity: the self as reflexively understood by the individual in terms of his or her biography.

Separation of time and space: the disentangling of separated dimensions of `empty' time and `empty' space, making possible the articulation of disembedded social relations across indefinite spans of time/space.

Sequestration of experience: the separation of day-to-day life from contact with experiences which raise potentially disturbing existential questions -- particularly experiences to do with sickness, madness, criminality, sexuality and death.

Symbolic tokens: media of exchange that have standard value and are thus interchangeable across an indefinite variety of contexts.

Trajectory of the self: the formation of a specific lifespan in conditions of modernity, by means of which self-development, as reflexively organised, tends to become internally referential.

Trust: the vesting of confidence in persons or in abstract systems, made on the basis of a `leap into faith' which brackets ignorance or lack of information.

Umwelt (Goffman): a phenomenal world with which the individual is routinely `in touch' in respect of potential dangers and alarms.

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 940