Wholesale Reflexivity [03.01.98]

‘The reflexivity of modern social life 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. We should all be clear about the nature of this phenomenon. All forms of social life are partly constituted by actors’ knowledge of them. Knowing ‘how to go on’ in Wittgenstein’s sense is intrinsic to the conventions which are drawn upon and reproduced by human activity. In all cultures, social practices are routinely altered in the light of ongoing discoveries which feed into them. But only in the era of modernity is the revision of convention radicalised to apply [in principle] to all aspects of human life, including technological intervention into the material world. It is often said that modernity is marked by an appetite for the new, but this is not perhaps completely accurate. What is characteristic of modernity is not an embracing of the new for its own sake, but the presumption of wholesale reflexivity - which of course includes reflection upon the nature of reflection itself.’

Anthony Giddens [1990]. The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge : Polity Press. [p. 38/9].