1 :: GENERAL INTRODUCTION
and controls are being placed on people today, such that it is questionable whether
collective or system units of meaning and action are socially significant. The rise of
reflexive modernization, according to Beck, is the living of lives increasingly
decision-dependent and in need of justification, re-elaboration, reworking and,
above all, reinvention. As a consequence, problems of self/society cohesion – the
integration of individualized individuals into the network of broader social relations
- necessarily arise in novel forms at both the micro and macro levels.
The new social theories of individualization have been subject to a barrage of
criticisms. Some critics argue that Giddens and Beck’s account of DIY self-
actualization exhibits a distinctly individualist bent, in a social theory that reduces
struggles over power and politics to mere individual negotiations of personal change.
Other critics have argued that the thesis of reflexive monitoring of the self clashes
with more critical understandings – psychoanalytic, post-structural and post-feminist
- of subjectivity in terms of repressed desire, difference or sexual power. A somewhat
related, but different slant on contemporary identity practices has been developed
by Elliott and Lemert, who contend that there is an emergent ‘new individualism’
sweeping the globe – one centred on continual self-actualization and instant
self-reinvention. Today this is nowhere more evident, argue Elliott and Lemert, than
in the pressure that consumerism puts on us to ‘transform’ and ‘improve’ every
aspect of ourselves: not just our homes and gardens but our careers, our food, our
clothes, our sex lives, our faces, minds and bodies. This reinvention trend occurs all
around us, not only in the rise of plastic surgery and the instant identity makeovers of
reality TV but also in compulsive consumerism, speed dating and therapy culture. In a
world that places a premium on instant gratification, the desire for immediate results
has never been as pervasive or acute. We have become accustomed to emailing
others across the planet in seconds, buying flashy consumer goods with the click of
a mouse, and drifting in and out of relations with others without long-term
commitments. Is it any wonder, Elliott and Lemert ask, that we now have different
expectations about life’s possibilities and the potential for change?
A world in which there is no choice but to choose, to paraphrase Giddens, is a world
in which identity becomes profoundly self-questioning, reflexive, re-inventive and
experimental. But if identity is experimental, then it is radically open-ended. There
are, in other words, no guarantees or guidelines for the conduct and consequences
of identity. This is the opportunity and the cost of identity in the early years of the
twenty-first century. And these are the challenges that the social sciences and
humanities face today in theorizing the possible trajectories of identity in a context
of advanced globalization. What prospects identity in a world of extensive new