1 :: GENERAL INTRODUCTION
subject became coterminous with the supremacy of the signifier. A variety of
concepts were introduced to capture this symbolic determination of the subject, from
Foucault’s notion of ‘technologies of the self ’ to Baudrillard’s account of ‘simulacra’,
or virtualization of identity. These accounts, in quite different ways, sought to specify
the ways that the decentred world of postmodernity extended to the core of
experience and everyday life, locking identity into new structures of seduction,
securitization, mediatization and virtualization. The political conundrums (and, in
time, dead-ends) of postmodernism was that culture in the form of decentred and
differential identity seemed increasingly out of step with our fast globalizing world
- particularly the globalizing forces of media, communications and culture. It seemed
difficult, to say the least, to track signs of cultural difference and identity diversity in a
world increasingly dominated by News Corporation, CNN and Yahoo.
As a consequence, new theories of identity emerged. There were, for example, a
variety of new theories of individualization – for which identity in the broad sense was
conceived as more than a mere ‘imposition’ from the outside, or ‘society’. According
to this account, identity is viewed not as an outcome of external linguistic or symbolic
systems, but as an open-ended and reflexive process of self-formation. In recent
years, social theorists such as Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, Manuel Castells,
Charles Lemert and Gilles Lipovetsky have developed powerful accounts of such a
view. For Giddens, in Modernity and Self-Identity (1991), identity today becomes
increasingly reflexive: self-identity is cast as a self-defining process that depends
upon the monitoring of, and reflection upon, psychological and social information
about possible trajectories of life. Any such information gleaned about self and world
is not simply incidental to experience and everyday life; it is actually constitutive of
what people do, who they think they are and how they ‘live’ their identities. ‘The
reflexivity of modern social life’, writes Giddens (1991: 38), ‘consists in the fact that
social practices are constantly examined and reformed in the light of incoming
information about those very practices, thus constitutively altering their character’.
Somewhat similar arguments have been developed by Beck. Traditional identity
practices, the anchor of premodern societies as well as all of the early phases of
modernization, take on a radically different status in conditions of what Beck calls
‘reflexive modernization’. Reflexive or accelerated modernization for Beck means
that traditions become less secure or taken for granted, and that consequently the
production of identity is something that becomes more and more open to choice,
scrutiny, debate and revision. This is an identity process that Beck calls
‘individualization’. To live in a detraditionalized world is to live in a society where life
is no longer lived as fate or destiny. According to Beck, new demands, opportunities