Aesthetic reflexivity is present  in an increasing number of spheres of everyday life and has much to do with the creation of one’s self-identity.

 

Aesthetic reflexivity is people making their own choices about their lives, being eclectic in their tastes and lifestyles, seeking to be a different individual from the masses, deepening their individuality through non-traditional choices.  “Aesthetic refers to artistic, visual, art, beauty.  Reflexivity refers to being able to look back on one’s existence in the information age and tailor one’s place in it and reassert your individuality.

 

 In the economy itself there is an ever-growing centrality of `design'-intensive production in many economic sectors.  This is needed because consumer goods and choices increase in number every month due to technology and the increasing individualization of tastes among consumers.

 

 If knowledge-intensive production of goods and services is embodied in the utility of the latter, design-intensivity is embodied in the `expressive component' of goods and services, a component having significance from the goods of the culture industries (movies,  music, video, the web) to the managed heart' of flight attendants, fast-food workers, teachers,  and other service sector personnel.

 

Consumer practices will likewise be grounded in aesthetic reflexivity, as will the `place-myths' that tourists and travellers construct and deconstruct.  (Such as the “wild west”, “exotic Asia” “Hollywood the land of stars”, “Las Vegas excitement”, “Catalina Getaway”, “Discover Greece”, “Majestic Alaska,” “Exquisite Europe,” “The Rugged Beauty of the Southwest,” etc.

 

Aesthetic reflexivity is embodied in the contemporary sense of time - in a widespread refusal of both clock time (the dream and quest to be younger, plastic surgery etc.) and any sort of utilitarian calculation of temporal organization (older people pursuing activities that were once the sole pursuit of youth and children becoming astonishingly mature at a young age).

 

Aesthetic reflexivity is embodied in the background assumptions, in the unarticulated practices in which meaning is routinely created in `new' communities - in subcultures (hip hop, rap, boy bands, MTV, golf, sports, etc) in imagined communities and in the `invented communities' of, for example, ecological and other late twentieth-century social movements.

 

As we have just suggested flows and reflexivity can be substantially contradictory and counteracting phenomena. But this is not the only possibility.

 

The individualization thesis (that people are increasingly becoming more and more individual in terms of taste, culture, fashion, etc), presupposed in the phenomenon of reflexivity, has been registered in Western social theory of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

 

In the United States in the pervasion of rational choice theory; in Europe through the impact of theories of reflexive modernization or reflexive modernity; and in Britain in ex-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's contentious assertion that there is no such thing as society, but just a set of entrepreneurial individuals (consumer and market-driven) in the context of a strongly empowered nation-state.

 

The notion of individualization (people doing what they want and not following a “mass line”) is also registered in apocalyptic pronouncements of the implosive implosion of `the social', the collapse of society.

 

Earlier existing social structures (religion, family, etc.) do have less power in monitoring increasingly autonomous agency (people’s preferences, choices, perceptions, relationships etc.)  than in the past.

 

But we do not argue that this entails some sort of end to the value of structure and society.

 

We propose to the contrary that there is indeed a structural basis for today's reflexive individuals.

 

And that this is not social structures, but increasingly the pervasion of information and communication structures.

 

We propose that there is the beginnings of the unfolding of a process in which social structures, national in scope, are being displaced by such global information and communication (I & C) structures.

 

These information and communication structures are the very networked flows, are the very economies of signs and space which are the subject of your understanding of the wonderland of the Information Age.

 

Understanding the  structured flows and accumulations of information are the basis of you seeing how deep the rabbit hole goes in terms of determining the matrix of our existences.

 

 Thus structured flows and accumulations of images, of expressive symbols (video, name brands, cool stores etc.) are the condition of aesthetic reflexivity.

 

 Thus the conditions of aesthetic reflexivity are economies of signs in space (malls, tract homes, brand names, fast food logos, advertisements, music videos, fashion are all signs that we accumulate in our possession to define our individuality and self-identity).

 

In post modernity the self becomes a `reflexive project'.

 

This involves an enhanced temporal (time) element.

 

Post- Modernity's (since the 1970’s) reflexive project `consists in the sustaining of coherent, yet continuously revised, biographical narratives of oneself, . . . in the context of multiple choice as filtered through abstract systems' (1991 a: 6).

 

The `objective time' of earlier modernity is superseded in post-modernity by a set of personalized, subjective times in these self-created narratives (1991a: 72; and see chapter 9 below on postmodern time).

This is an emptied out sense of time.

 

Thus self-help therapies are understood as `methods of life-planning', or in terms of `life calendars' (1991a: ch 6).

 

Thus the reflexive project of the self passes via the mediation of `new systems that penetrate day-to-day life and offer multiple choices rather than fixed guidelines for action (via the traditional church, family, society)' as used to be the case up to the 1960’s.(1991a: 84).

 

The future is understood `in terms of personal action in the present' instead of in terms of events.

 

Post-modernity rips the foundations out from abstract objective time and internalizes them reflexively as the subjective time of one’s own life narratives.   In other words, the perception of time itself becomes individualized, each person with a different perception of past, present and future tailored to their individually created biographies.

 

In this sense there really isn’t any future…just a deep sense of the present that perpetually recreates the past to understand, justify, and make sense of the present.  But we will discuss this later.