Civility: A Cultural History by Benet Davetian

Author:Benet Davetian [Davetian, Benet]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC000000
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: 2009-04-17T18:30:00+00:00

The Freeing of the Expressive Body

Social scientists who focus on textual research (as we have done in chapters 1 to 7) run the risk of ignoring ongoing developments in popular culture. What C. Wright Mills (1959) termed ‘methodological inhibition’ has prevented many serious scholars from considering the intimate relationships between popular culture, individual psychology, and social structure. American sociologists have particularly been vulnerable to ignoring the massive effects of popular media. Aghast at some of the ‘easy fixes’ offered up by media inspirational speakers, they have discounted the substantial influence these speakers have had on social norms and outcomes. For example, TV personality Oprah Winfrey, commanding a daily audience of over 60 million viewers, has as much influence on the social standards and behaviour of a population as any politician or social philosopher – in the short run at least.

Anthony Giddens has taken into account the close connections between social change and popular culture. In Modernity and Self-Identity ([1991] 2001) he has listed the major ‘dilemmas’ of the self in late modernity as it faces the demands of ideological, psychological, and systemic changes. The rise of the late-modern concept of selfhood has occurred in the intersection of four basic mutually antagonistic forces: ‘unification versus fragmentation, powerlessness versus appropriation, authority versus uncertainty, and personalized versus commodified experience’ (180–201).

These contraindications have led to a culture of increasing ‘risk.’ Contingency and the eclipsing of authority by a market-driven economy have broadened the field of human experience and caused fragmentation within previously unified local habitats (189). Yet, this fragmentation has also had unitary effects, for it has released aspects of personal and collective existence that may have been previously repressed. As markets have expanded and ignored ‘pre-established forms of behaviour’ they have promoted an individualism that has become entrusted with servicing the problematic of its newborn identity and responsibilities (197). The resulting (and necessary) ‘self-reflexivity’ has been a peculiar characteristic of the late-modern self which has been forced to construct its identity in a fragmented world in which the authority of tradition and elders has become replaced by the multiple and conflicting views of ‘experts’ (195).

In such a contingent culture, the individual is forced to anchor himself in a self-referential piecing-together of ‘meaning.’ Scepticism is an outcome of such uncertainty. As the control of a central political and moral authority decreases in the face of rival minority groups, the individual is given more responsibility to control his own life. And that control is made possible only when there is a life plan available, a process through which the person can keep track of where he is in the narrative of his life at any given moment. An individual has to ask questions that are often intensely personal: Where am I in my own existence? How am I feeling? Am I satisfied or not? How can I help myself to feel more satisfied? To whom do I belong?

And these were, indeed, the questions that emerged from the American cultural revolution of the 1960s. When members

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