{"id":107,"date":"2018-07-18T09:15:53","date_gmt":"2018-07-18T09:15:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/socp2.epgpbooks.inflibnet.ac.in\/?post_type=chapter&p=107"},"modified":"2019-05-03T11:47:37","modified_gmt":"2019-05-03T11:47:37","slug":"modernity-risk-and-reflexivity-an-introductory-overview","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in\/socp2\/chapter\/modernity-risk-and-reflexivity-an-introductory-overview\/","title":{"rendered":"Modernity, Risk, And Reflexivity: An Introductory Overview"},"content":{"raw":"
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1.\u00a0<\/strong>S<\/strong>i<\/strong>t<\/strong>u<\/strong>ating Reflexivity: The Many Discourses and Contestations in Contemporary Sociology<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n

The idea of reflexivity, it may be said, makes for both, the imminent radicalism of the sociological, and its most preliminary orthodoxy. Contained in this thesis, then, is the idea that the notion of reflexivity must allude not only to the epistemic possibilities of the discipline, but also to its persistent historicity \u2013 to its enduring object, that irrevocable \u2018reflexivity\u2019 of social action. It is the latter however, that makes also for the inevitable disciplinary transgressions of the thesis of reflexivity \u2013 the fact that it must remain both, peculiar to the sociological and most incontestably universal, alluding to the fundamental disposition of the human condition, and hence also, of all human enquiry (Bonner 2001).<\/p>\r\n \r\n

Implicit then, are two distinct traditions of enquiry that negotiate the essentiality of reflexivity to the discourse(s) of sociology: one that must regard reflexivity as the preliminary object of sociology, and the other that must presume reflexivity to be an inevitable methodological precondition. It might not be incorrect then, however, most definitely reductionist to render the distinction as primarily one of ontology and epistemology respectively, given that there must remain an inevitable correspondence between the two orders \u2013 that categories of thought must conform to the truth(s) of being, that the method must presume also, not only its contingent object, but also, the sovereign subject.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

It was the affirmation of the necessity of an ontological reflexivity that made in the early theoretical moorings of the discipline, for its disciplinary distinction. It made that is, in the rendering of a distinct, manifest \u2018object\u2019, for the autonomy of the sociological \u2013 an autonomy that marked the separation of sociology from its methodological correlates in the natural sciences. Both, in its \u2018objectivist\u2019 Durkheimian and \u2018interpretive\u2019 Weberian traditions, the idea of reflexivity was pronounced as the critical precondition of its enduring object \u2013 of human social behavior, of all social action (Salzman 2002). Reflexivity became the fundamental marker of the \u2018social\u2019 nature of human actions and behavior, a condition that marked the distinction of man from animal, and of the social from the natural.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

It was the radicalization of the reflexive object that made, it may be said, also for the epistemic preeminence of reflexivity\u2013 the unsettling of the fixity of the other, a contestation of the early objectivist obstinacy in the wake of the unrelenting and most fundamental transformations in the extant social order. Modernity that had contained the emergence and beginnings of the discipline, the certainty and the promise of its method that is, also made for its emergent skepticism. It was the unsettling of its ontological affirmations that made inevitable a radical methodological reform- that called for a reflexive method to remake the sociological.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

Reflexivity was only transformed into a meticulous methodological principal with the interventions of the Hermeneutic discourse, the emergence of what is today referred to as SSK (Sociology of Scientific Knowledge) or the Sociology of Knowledge (its early references manifest in the works for instance, of Mannheim, Woolgar, Bloor, and Barnes), and radicalized subsequently by the post-structuralist, postmodern turn in ethnography particularly and the social sciences more generally. Methodological reflexivity called for a subversion of the objectivist schema, for a methodical unmaking of the obstinate certainty of positive science. In its more contemporary articulations, reflexivity calls also, for a denunciation\u00a0 of subjectivist \u00a0nihilism, \u00a0of a \u00a0relativising subjectivism that \u00a0had\u00a0 made for \u00a0its \u00a0epistemic\u00a0constriction. Manifest in the works of Bourdieu and Giddens for instance, reflexivity becomes a radical principal of methodological and ontological skepticism, an affirmation of the inevitable dialectic of sociality.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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Reflexivity contains in that, it may be said, the unmaking of what was for Bourdieu, \u2018the most fundamental and the most ruinous\u2019 of \u2018all the oppositions that artificially divide social science\u2019 \u2013 that which is \u2018set up between subjectivism and objectivism\u2019 (Bourdieu 1990:25). Through a radical epistemic reordering, through affirming the inevitable contingency of both, the subject and object, reflexivity calls for a comprehensive reformation of the social sciences. Given the plurality of the discourses and the many interpretations of reflexivity however, the sociological articulations of the notion remain fraught with disjunctures and contestations, theoretical interjections that make for both, the inevitable elusiveness and complexity of the term. It is this multiplicity of meanings and interpretations, the diverse array of articulations that contain also however, its imminent possibilities, possibilities of both, a persistent orthodoxy and that of an inevitable radicalism.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

The trajectory of the notion of reflexivity thus, in a certain sense, may be regarded as one traversing the historiography of the discipline itself. From the certainty of objectivist science, in an affirmation of the promise of positivism, to a vehement denunciation of its ontological and epistemic presumptions, the notion of reflexivity demonstrates the emergent skepticism and resultant ambivalence of sociology towards not only its enduring object, but also its own biography. This trajectory culminates in what may be regarded as three distinct discourses of reflexivity in contemporary sociological theory:<\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\na. Sociological thought that presumes a definite historicity of reflexivity such that the idea of reflexivity is inextricably linked to a definite epoch in the history of modernity (as a correlate of \u2018late\u2019 modernity)\r\n\r\nb. The \u00a0postmodern \u00a0turn \u00a0that \u00a0makes \u00a0reflexivity \u00a0a \u00a0necessary \u00a0condition \u00a0of critical ethnography.\r\n\r\nc. The discourse of epistemic reflexivity that calls for a sociology that presumes a meticulous, methodical self-confrontation.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n2. The Biography of a Discipline: Sociology, Modernity and Radicalized Reflexivity\u00a0<\/strong>\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n2.1 The Promise of Modernity\u00a0<\/strong>\r\n\r\n \r\n

The very project of sociology, it may be argued, remains in a certain sense, most profoundly reflexive. For it has, since its early beginnings in the 18th century and in its establishment as a distinct academic discipline in the 19th century, been engaged in a relentless scrutiny of the modern. It was these context(s), structures and processes of modernity however that had made also, for the fundamental conditions of its own emergence. Sociology as a discipline, it is now commonplace, had emerged at a specific juncture in western history, an epoch that had contained in itself the emergent structures of modernity- that had in that been both, a precondition to, and constitutive of, the epistemic presumptions of the discipline. The trajectory of sociology thus remains one of an inevitable ambivalence, a historiography fraught with ambiguity and incongruity- from the convictions of early modernity and its correlate in positive science to the tumultuous truth(s) of the late modern order (Pathak 2006; Hekman 1986).<\/p>\r\n \r\n

Sociology\u2019s engagement with the modern as aforementioned, has been necessarily incongruous \u2013 sustaining in its most fundamental epistemic and ontological presumptions, both, the fervent optimism of early modernity and a definite yearning for the bygone. There has remained thus, a persistent skepticism towards even some of its most uncontested principles, towards the convictions of its emancipatory promise, towards its aspirations for the human condition. Sociological thought \u00a0has thus sustained a\u00a0manifest ambiguity, a plurality of discourses on the methodological and ontological affirmations of the enlightenment, on the promise of social progress, on the unity of the sciences and the autonomy of its principal object.<\/span><\/p>\r\n \r\n

In its early beginnings, sociological thought, it remains apparent, presumed both, the necessity and inevitability of the modern \u2013 the idea that not only was modernity a critical precondition to human progress, but it was inexorable given the radical transformations that were already underway. Emerging in what Hekman (1986:5) refers to, as \u2018the shadow\u2019 of \u2018the triumphs\u2019 of the natural sciences, early sociology enshrined what may be regarded, the essential tenets of the European enlightenment \u2013 a dogmatic affirmation of the autonomy of the individual, an obstinate notion of history and its linearity, the idea of human progress impelled by the conquests of science and the necessary singularity of the notion of scientificity itself.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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It was this spirit of optimism, a conviction in and of the radical possibilities of science and the essentiality of the latter for all human cultivation, that made for early sociological insights into the nature of modernity and the possibilities that its social, economic and political order sustained for humankind. Comtean positivism for instance, affirmed both, the possibility of the meta-science of social reality and the manifest potentiality of such enquiry in the direction and cultivation of human progress. Affirming the linearity of such progress, Durkheimian sociology in its own right called for the singularity of science, the unity of the scientific method that was to inform also, the sciences of the social. Weber saw in the dominion of modern reason, the possibility of unparalleled efficiency and economic advance. Marx argued for the linearity of historical progress and the preeminence of science in its culmination through its conquests of both, the natural world and of ideology (Pathak 2006; Hekman 1986).<\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\nFor these early theorists then, modernity came to imply:\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\na. The affirmation of the autonomous individual\r\n\r\nb. The progressive atrophying of tradition\r\n\r\nc. The \u00a0cultivation \u00a0of \u00a0critical \u00a0consciousness \u00a0and \u00a0an \u00a0ethos \u00a0of \u00a0enquiry, experimentation and exploration\r\n\r\nd. The \u00a0establishment \u00a0of \u00a0political \u00a0democracy\u00a0 and \u00a0the \u00a0assertion \u00a0of \u00a0the individual citizen as a bearer of essential rights\r\n\r\ne. Increasing segmentation making for more complex forms of economic\r\n\r\nand social organization\r\n\r\nf. The emergence of capitalism and industrial society\r\n\r\ng. Urbanism and the rise of the city\r\n\r\n \r\n

The promise of modernity and the exaltation of positive science made for a definite faith in what may be regarded, the fundamental dogma of scientificity. Modernity as such, came to represent a definite epistemic stance, a manifest affirmation of a distinct mode of enquiry that had remained both, a consequence of and precondition to the social and economic transformations in the modern order. The social correlates of modernity in that, remained inextricably linked to its methodological presumptions, its distinct epistemic imperatives that had made for early sociology, for what it regarded, the uncontestable triumph of the scientific imagination.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

This mode of knowing came to be most radically differentiated from the interiority and dogmatism of earlier means of enquiry (Seidman 1983). It remained premised, most fundamentally, on the hegemonic preeminence of reason, of a rationality that came to be affirmed in the methodical delineation of a meticulous, unfaltering empiricism. It was this completeness that made for the categorical correspondence of modern science \u2013 that between the ontological and the epistemic, between being and knowing. In that, it affirmed the promise of modernity, of profound and ceaseless progress, of the possibility of absolute\u00a0human mastery over nature and the material world, the promise of an eternal surplus. It was in this revelry of the natural sciences, that early sociology hailed the presumptions and methods of the new science, the fundamental dogma(s) of modern scientificity:<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\na. Objectivism that made for the sovereignty of the scientific subject and the autonomy of its object-other. Objectivism proclaimed an unassailable disjuncture between subject and object, between fact and value.\r\n\r\nb. Universalist knowledge premised on the ascendance of Cartesian Rationalism and the regimentations of Baconian empiricism.\r\n\r\nc. The normative identity of Truth and Science (Hekman, 1986).\r\n\r\nd. A foundationalist affirmation of the singularity of the scientific method\r\n\r\ne. The correspondence of Knowledge and Representation that proclaimed the mimetic precision of modern science\r\n\r\nf. An inevitable operationalism that made, in the preeminence of Baconian empiricism, utility the elementary criterion of Truth.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n2.2\u00a0 Sociology and the Modern Quandary\u00a0<\/strong>\r\n\r\n \r\n

Amidst the revelries of modernity, the euphoria of scientific advance and the industrial revolution, the a priori reflexivity of sociology remains apparent, made inevitable also an enduring ambivalence \u2013 a necessarily ambiguous engagement with modernity and hence also, with the conditions of its own making. Since its early beginnings then, the discipline espoused a definite criticality towards the consequences of industrial society, of a social, spatial and economic ordering that it regarded as the necessary consequence of modernity. There remained as such, even in its early moorings, a definite malaise with the idea of the modern, a theoretical confirmation of the limitedness of the project of modernity and the necessary displeasures that it must entail (Nisbet 1976). What made for the predicament of the modern, for sociology, was the necessity of its persistent paradox \u2013 the promise of industrial advance and scientific certainty had made inevitable also an imminent decadence, inescapable human misery and profound despair.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

The most articulate rendering of such skepticism, it may be said, remains manifest in the work of Durkheim. For Durkheim, the evolutionary imperative of the transition from \u2018mechanical\u2019 to \u2018organic\u2019 solidarity that implied a complex division of labor, consequent advances in technology and industrial production, and the breakdown of traditional unfreedoms, made also for a heightened sense of isolation and insecurity, a communal moral atrophy that would culminate in a profound and pervasive \u2018anomie\u2019 (Durkheim 1947). It was this sense of isolation and alienation, of moral degradation that found its correlate in unrestricted desires and aspirations, in fragile bonds and pervasive disillusionment, all of which made for Durkheim, for the rising rates of suicides in the emerging cities of a rapidly industrializing Europe.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

Such pathos of modernity was also manifest in the writings of Marx, Weber and Simmel, all of whom, like Durkheim, made the modern condition a critical object of sociological enquiry. These early thinkers demonstrate a palpable disaffection with the consequences of the modernity, more particularly, with the human implications of its specific economic, social and spatial ordering. Modernity then, emerges as a fundamental site of violence, an \u2018iron cage\u2019 as Weber affirms, where the human subject remains most ruthlessly fragmented \u2013 alienated from the most essential states of herself, dismembered in a meticulous unmaking of both, the ontological wholeness of man and her essential relatedness. It is the mechanistic reductionism of modern science, the ascendance of instrumental reason and the epistemic privileging of a rapacious empiricism that makes for, in the early imagination of the discipline, for the inevitable predicament of modernity \u2013 the eventual distortion, dismemberment and conquest of its sovereign subject, the dismantling of the promise of modernity.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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Such apprehension in the early sociological discourses of modernity, it may be said, comes to be structured into a meticulous methodological skepticism with the progressive radicalization of sociological reflexivity. The trajectory of the discipline as such, demonstrates a manifest shift from the convictions of modernity and of the scientific imagination, to a reflexive realization of the essential elusiveness both, the object of sociological enquiry and its epistemic presumptions. Manifested in the many contestations and discourses (for instance, in the assertions of the hermeneutic or phenomenological imagination in sociology) on the nature of the sociological object and its methods, reflexivity in the emergent post- modernist and post-structural traditions particularly, comes to effect a radical subversion \u2013 a meticulous and cumulative unmaking of the methodological order of sociological enquiry, the sovereignty of the sociological subject, and the enduring autonomy of its object other. Contained in the many discourses of reflexivity as such, is a radical rethinking of the most fundamental of the presumptions of modernity, a schema of profound and complete reform that must subvert both, the epistemic and ontological presumptions of modern scientificity.<\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n3. Risk, \u00a0Reflexivity \u00a0and \u00a0the \u00a0Radicalization \u00a0of \u00a0Modernity: \u00a0Sociological \u00a0Enquiries \u00a0into \u00a0the Contemporary\u00a0<\/strong>\r\n\r\n \r\n

Culminating in what has come to be termed, the \u2018Risk-society\u2019 thesis, the radical skepticism of early sociological thinking on modernity and its consequences makes, it may be argued, for the preeminence of the notion of reflexivity in the contemporary sociological delineations of the nature of its object. Reflexivity that is, in the \u2018risk-society\u2019 thesis, comes to be regarded as a necessary correlate of the contemporary \u2013 of \u2018late\u2019\/\u2018high\u2019 modernity, what Anthony Giddens, for instance regards, as the radicalization of the traditional modern. For Ulrich Beck, it is the essentiality of reflexivity, its profundity and pervasiveness in our times that makes for this radicalization.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

What this represents, what makes for this critical transition from traditional modernity to the contemporary epoch, is the ubiquitous preeminence of the notion of \u2018risk\u2019 (Giddens 1990; 2002. See also, Beck 1992). What makes for the distinction of the traditional and the modern, what makes in itself, for the condition of \u2018late modernity\u2019, that is, is the transition, more specifically, from the category of \u2018danger\u2019 to that of \u2018risk\u2019. For the latter, Giddens argues, presumes a necessary extroversion, and comes into preeminence only \u2018in a society that is future oriented \u2013 which sees the future precisely as a territory to be conquered or colonized\u201d, in \u201ca society that actively tries to break away from the past\u2019 (2002:22). It is the pervasiveness of risk that conditions for him, the emergence of a \u2018radicalized\u2019 modernity, one that makes in the logic of its self-constitution, for both, the necessary confrontation of the past and the perpetual uncontrollability of the future, for the reflexive then, as the essential condition of our times.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

It is this inevitable and normative self-confrontation that makes for Beck, for the unintended reflexivity of the late modern order \u2013 the idea that the notion of the risk must presume not only a persistent and \u2018subversive, unintended and unforeseen self-questioning\u2019 (2000:101) but the reflexive confrontation of the self must itself contribute to the riskiness of the contemporary. The reflexivity of modernity as such, contains for Beck, the fundamental condition of its precariousness \u2013of its permanent uncontrollability, of the inevitable inadequacy and incompleteness of our mechanisms of risk assessment, management and reparation. This precariousness, the eternal changeability of globality in the risk-society thesis remains articulated in a dual schema \u2013 manifest in the works of Giddens and Beck for instance, is the idea that the riskiness of \u2018late modernity\u2019 must make reflexive not only the late modern subject, that reflexivity must remain an attribute, not merely of the individual self, but also of a generative social (See also Lash 1994). Reflexivity then, remains both, \u2018marked as a characteristic of contemporary biographies and a structural artifact of late\/high modernity\u2019 such that the \u2018imperative to self-consciously and reflexively construct\u00a0one\u2019s own identity\u2019 remains a necessary condition of the global structural overhaul\u2019 (Kenway and McLeod 2004:526).<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n3.1 The Late-Modern Subject and the D-I-Y Biography\u00a0<\/strong>\r\n\r\n \r\n

Self-reflexivity as such, emerges as the function of the late-reflexive subject, of a post-traditional self unconstrained by the prescriptions of tradition. The late-modern self comes to be constituted as a self- instituted \u2018project\u2019 increasingly delinked from the normative orthodoxies of the traditional order. This emancipation of the subject, the progressive transcendence of the structural remains effected most profoundly, within the structures of late modernity, in the traditions of the its unbridled individualization and fragmentation. Individualization, then, for Beck, remains a structural attribute of late modernity, a condition that sustains in itself, irrespective of the possibility of perpetual structural confrontation. Individualization, he argues, \u2018means that the standard biography becomes a chosen biography\u2019 (Beck Giddens and Lash 1994:15), a reflexively ordered self-reality effected through \u2018disembedding\u2019, and secondly, through \u2018reembedding of industrial society ways of life by new ones, in which the individual must produce, stage and cobble together their biographies themselves\u2019 (Ibid: 13). It is this context that Giddens proclaims that we are no longer \u2018what we are, but what we make of ourselves\u2019 (1991:75). The decline and waning of traditions in late modernity makes for him, for a dismantling of \u2018action and ontological frameworks\u2019 (ibid:48) such that the individual now actively organize, cultivate and manage her life in a perpetual and reflexive making of self-identities. Where orthodoxies themselves become reflexive, where traditions must themselves be \u2018chosen and invented\u2019, they come to bear force \u2018only through the decisions and experience of individuals\u2019 (Beck 2003: 276). Individuals remain most profoundly \u2018sequestered\u2019(Giddens 1991), devoid of purpose, of the fundamental telos of being.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

The late-modern subject, in that, remains necessarily ensnared, in the revelry of desire, in the tyranny of freedoms- the contemporary self remains most profoundly unfree, caricatured by the fallacy of sovereignty, of a being devoid of all morality. For Bauman, it is such \u2018sequestration\u2019, the inevitable \u2018internal referentiality\u2019 (ibid) of modernity that makes for its fatalism. For Bauman (1995) then, the late modern order must sustain of necessity, even amidst the proliferation of choices, of the many avenues of consumption and gratification, only a chimera of agency. Choice itself comes to be suspended, ephemeral given the tumultuous \u2018succession of episodes\u2019 (ibid: 5) that come to mark the eternal immediacy of the late-modern biography. For Bauman, what were deemed to be the necessary correlates of agency \u2013 guilt and responsibility are now abdicated in a structured displacement of authority, in an institutionalized disavowal of choice to the precarious and transient truths of the late modern condition. \u2018The consequences of choice\u2019, Bauman argues, \u2018outlive, as a rule, the authority on whose advice the choice had been made\u2019 (ibid), an authority, that for Beck, remains perpetually unmade in the reflexivity of late modernity, in the contingency and precariousness of its institutions and structure(s) itself.<\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n3.2\u00a0 Structural Reflexivity and\u00a0 Tumultuous Reign of the Expert(s)\u00a0<\/strong>\r\n\r\n \r\n

The structural\/institutional reflexivity (Bagguley 2003) of late modernity remains inextricably linked, as aforementioned, to the pervasiveness of the notion of \u2018risk\u2019 in the contemporary order. Reflexivity, in its structural order as such, emerges in the transition from the traditional to the late modern and remains situated in the profound precariousness effected as a consequence of ubiquitous risks, particularly in the emergence of what Giddens terms,\u2018manufactured risks\u2019 (Giddens 2002). It is this notion of \u2018manufactured risks\u2019 that contains, it may be said, the fundamental and persistent paradox of late modernity \u2013 the fact that risk and uncertainty must remain the necessary outcomes of human interventions for control and conquest. \u00a0That \u00a0risk \u00a0must \u00a0remain \u00a0ubiquitous, \u00a0because \u00a0it \u00a0is \u00a0the \u00a0mechanisms \u00a0of \u00a0risk \u00a0management \u00a0\u2013\u00a0knowledge, expertise and scientific and technological advances in and for curtailing a pervasive riskiness, that must in fact, make for its dogged persistence.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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While reflexivity, it is argued, becomes a structural condition of late modernity- of a society that is sustained in a radical and perpetual self-confrontation, it is this essential condition of continual self- appraisal that secures in effect, the permanence of an unmanageable, surplus riskiness. What the condition of structural reflexivity implies, more specifically, is that the \u2018regularized use of knowledge about circumstances of social life\u2019 must itself be a \u2018constitutive element in its organization and transformation\u2019 (Giddens, 1991:20). For Giddens then, it is this in-turning of information, concepts and knowledge onto the conditions of their emergence that makes for the structural reflexivity of late modernity. \u2018The reflexivity of modern social life\u2019, he thus asserts, consists not in the absence or impossibility of a \u2018stable social world\u2019, but precisely, in the fact that \u2018the knowledge of that world must\u2019 in itself, \u2018contribute to its unstable and mutable character\u2019 (Giddens 1990:45).<\/p>\r\n \r\n

Contained in the ascendance of the many expert systems, such institutionalized reflexivity comes to be regarded as a fundamental attribute of a radicalized modernity. What marks the distinction of the late modernity in fact, is the \u2018all pervasive scope\u2019 (Giddens 1991:30) of these systems of measurement and appraisal, what Beck regards, a proliferating \u2018calculus of risk\u2019 (Mythen 2004) that is institutionalized for the domestication and management of the imminent uncertainties and catastrophic risks of our times. Reflexivity in the late modern order as such, remains effected primarily through the logic of science, through a \u2018modernization of modernization\u2019 manifest in the reign of the expert \u2013 in the expert systems of techno-science and in the hegemonic preeminence of instrumental reason. Reflexivity in the late modern order then, remains utterly scientistic (Lash 1994; Elliot 1995), effected in and through a scientificity that must ultimately remain necessarily inadequate, constitutive itself of an impending, and relentless riskiness.<\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n4. Many Reflexivities: Dialogues, Contestations and the Possibilities of a Reformed Sociology\u00a0<\/strong>\r\n\r\n \r\n

Such scientistic rendering of reflexivity however, comes to be most meticulously contested in some of the emergent traditions of sociological thought. The critique of scientism, it may be argued, remains itself, a necessary outcome of the radical reflexivity of the sociological \u2013 a condition that makes for the inevitable denunciation of the fundamental presumptions of modern scientificity, its dogmatic objectivism, the imminent nihilism of its radical subjectivist contestations and the obstinate disjuntures that make for its methodological schema.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

Lash (1994) and Elliot (1995) for instance, assert the ruthlessly objectivist and instrumental presumptions of late modern reflexivity. Structural reflexivity in the contemporary times, they argue remains necessarily \u2018caught within a modernist prism\u2019 (Elliot 1995:722) such that it is the logic of modern science\u00a0\u2013 Beck\u2019s \u2018calculus of risk\u2019 for instance institutionalizes the instrumentality of scientific expertise. It is the \u2018calculus of risk\u2019 that is, that makes for him, also, the essential \u2018relations of definition\u2019 \u2013 the \u201cbasic principles underlying industrial production, law, science, opportunities for the public and public policy\u2026that decide about data, knowledge, proofs, culprits and compensation\u2019 (of risks) (Beck 1995 cited in Mythen 2004:54). It is this preeminence of the scientific manifest also in Giddens\u2019 \u2018expert systems\u2019 \u2013 the proliferating systems of knowledge, measurement and appraisal that make also for the perpetual riskiness of the late modern order. Such a rendering of reflexivity, for Lash (1994) remains necessarily inadequate, most fundamentally erroneous, for what it effects, is a near complete bracketing of the \u2018aesthetic\u2019, an inevitable severance, that for Giddens affirms the obstinate \u2018internal referentiality\u2019 of late modernity \u2013 it is thus for him, \u2018positivistic thought in one guise or another\u2019, becomes \u2018the central guiding thread in modernity\u2019s reflexivity\u2019 (1991:155).<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n \r\n

Scientism and the singularity of science itself come to be adically contested in what may be regarded, theoretical-ethnographic or postmodern articulations of reflexivity. The postmodern critique or the critical\/experimental turn in ethnographic writings, for instance, presents a radical self-critique of conventional ethnography as both, a method of knowing and a convention of presentation. Contained in the works of ethnographer-anthropologists like George Marcus, James Clifford, Steven Seidman and Renato Rosaldo, among others, the postmodern critique contests the very presumptions of representational knowledge \u2013 the obstinate realism and mimetic convictions of modern scientificity. Reflexivity, in this tradition of thought, as such, comes to imply most fundamentally, the contingency of both, the ethnographic subject and object, and the inevitable precariousness and partiality of all scientific truths. In a reflexive ethnography then, the ethnographer must become \u2018as much the question as the questioner\u2019 (Parker 1985 cited in Watson 1987:33) subverting most meticulously, the dogged extroversion of the scientific order.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n

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Such subversion, in the works of Bourdieu (1990; 1998) for instance, comes to be instituted not in the subjective reflections of the scientific subject, but in the structuring of the sociological method(s) itself. What makes for Bourdieu, that is, for the essential limitation of the latter, is the structured incapacity for systematic \u2018self-objectification\u2019 \u2013 the fact that the method of sociology must necessarily preclude the critical investigation of its own disciplinary unconscious , of \u2018the unthought categories of thought which delimit \u00a0the thinkable \u00a0and \u00a0predetermine \u00a0the \u00a0thought\u2019 \u00a0(Bourdieu \u00a01982 \u00a0cited \u00a0in \u00a0Wacquant \u00a01992:40). Reflexivity \u00a0as such, for Bourdieu, remains a \u00a0fundamental \u00a0condition \u00a0of \u00a0methodological \u00a0rigor \u00a0that structures a perpetual vigilance into the method of social sciences, a rigor that presumes the meticulous objectification of the conditions of its own making. It is only such \u2018sociology of sociology\u2019 that must contain the possibility, for Bourdieu, of a radical, rigorous and indisputably \u2018better sociology\u2019 (2004:4).<\/p>\r\n \r\n

A \u2018better sociology\u2019, however, Gouldner argues, remains possible only in a radical denunciation of the logic of objectivation. For Goulder then, the radicalism of reflexivity is contained in precisely this possibility. Reflexivity, that is, he argues, fundamentally unmakes what for him, is the most debilitating disjuncture of the sociological method \u2013 the structured severance of subject and object, the enduring dualism that makes for sociology\u2019s sustained conservatism. Reflexivity thus, for Gouldner, presumes primarily, a perpetual recognition of \u2018the depth of our kinship with those whom we study\u2019 (1970:490). In this for Gouldner, is contained the necessary ethicality of reflexivity \u2013 the inevitable normativeness of a method that calls for a radical monism, the moral communion of the researcher and the researched, the subject and object. Reflexivity as such, promises for Gouldner, the blending of sociological rigour \u2018with a touch of mercy\u2019 such that the skills sociologists may possess \u2018may come to yield not only information but perhaps even a modest measure of wisdom\u2019 (ibid). What such sociology must address then is not only \u2018how to work, but how to live\u2019 (1970:489).<\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\nPerhaps, it is in this moral possibility that is contained the fundamental radicalism of reflexivity.\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n5. Summary\u00a0<\/strong>\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nThe following points of importance can be gathered from this chapter:\r\n