Giddens’ Adaptation:
Imaginary Suicide in Reflexive Modernity
Kuo-Kuei Kao
Abstract
This essay argues an imaginary mode of suicide at work in Giddens’
discourse of late-modernity. First, Giddens’ early study of suicide is read as a
mediator behind his transition from the theory of structuration to that of
reflexive modernity, given the problematic status of agency. Moreover, this
claim will be demonstrated by Giddens’ revolt against Durkheimian
sociology. On the one hand, he coins the type of “attempted suicide” to
reverse Durkheim’s sociology of suicide, thereby overturning a structural
theory of society into a risk-taking theory of action. On the other hand, he
reappropriates Durkheim’s political sociology to forge a link between suicide
and reflexive agency. In this sense, Giddens’ early theory of suicide is the
disavowed truth of his late theory of reflexive modernity. Accordingly, the
problem with Giddens’ theory of society is that the preconditioned notion of
attempted suicide plays with the suicido-generic simulation of death, hence
avoiding the destructive force of real death. As such, suicide in the sense of a
form of challenge to the production of social structure as such is re-totalized
as the agential reproduction of social structures. In effect, the politics of
reflexive modernization reveals Giddens’ adaptation to a neo-liberal society
of the undead, a worldless society of individuals linked by the terror of death
without death, imaginary suicide without suicide.
Keywords: recursivity, reflexivity, attempted suicide, imaginary suicide,
adaptation
Kuo-Kuei Kao
_______________________________________________________
1.
1
A passage from recursivity to reflexivity
Giddens’ work reveals a theoretical transition from the recursive
structuration of society to the reflexive modernization of the self.1 This divide
has been seen by commentators as a problematic dislocation of
methodological perspective from agency/structure to reflexive system.2
The central argument of Giddens’ structuration theory is to reconcile a
series of oppositions between agency and structure, structure and system, and
further reproduction and change within the recursive realm of “everyday
life”. 3 Meanwhile, he is interested in the so-called “critical situations” to
represent the systemic instability of human psyche.
4
Radicalizing the
Durkheimian line, he adduces Le Bon’s analysis of mob behavior and
Bettelheim’s study of Nazi concentration camps to upset the status quo of
routinization. The social psychological realm opened up here could be less
abnormal than general in late-modernity.
The generalization of abnormal social phenomena favours the systemic
perspective to that of everyday structuration. Notwithstanding bounded by his
recursive theory of society, multiple social realities could be better explained
through a non-linear logic of reflexivity. To be exact, he theorizes two facets
of reflexivity: one is on the side of agency and the other system. On the one
hand, the agential notion of reflexivity is known throughout his work as
“reflexive monitoring of action,” in which elements, such as the unconscious
and anxiety in the motivational structure and unintended consequences of
action, are mentioned in passing because of their functional value to
reproduce social practice by knowledgeable agents. 5 On the other hand, the
systemic aspect of reflexivity appeared first in the two explicit formulae of
“interdependence of action” and “reflexive self-regulation” in Central
Problems in Social Theory. 6 Then, it faded out nearly all together in The
Constitution of Society where the notion of system was simultaneously
2
Giddens’ Adaptation: Imaginary Suicide in Reflexive Modernity
_______________________________________________________
marginalized due to the central plot of agency, structure and change. Finally,
it resurfaced in The Nation-State and Violence and particularly from The
Consequences of Modernity onwards.7 In light of this, the latter two pieces of
work could be regarded as the empirical and theoretical manifestos of latemodernity with a distinctive approach to reflexive global systems.
Examined closely, Giddens presents, first, a historical-sociological study
of nation-states. His argument consists of two theses, which are
industrialization/ pacification of war and globalization/ internationalization of
nation-states. Giddens’ rich historical narrative demonstrates the systemic
reflexivity of knowledge/ power from rule to government. Meanwhile, the
meaning of systemic reflexivity is deprived of the reflexive monitoring of
action, but further loaded with the dialectic of control, given the evolution of
military industrialism and international diplomacy. In short, systemic
reflexivity becomes dominant at the outset of nation-states’ building. Second,
this institutional turn is radicalized in The Consequences of Modernity. Novel
themes like late-modernity, globalization, and risk take up the central
argument along with system and reflexivity. Ironically, reflexivity here
implies more about the unintended consequences of action, relegating in the
meantime the enabling aspect of reflexive monitoring to a purely functional
value. Given the case, the social mechanism of reflexivity is altered from
agential power to knowledge/ power. Accordingly, the embodied sense of an
institutionalized system defined in the structuration theory as “recursively
organized practices” is undermined. The upshot is a risky world of “abstract
systems.” In the prevalence of extra-ordinary critical situations, trust, anxiety
and ontological security become urgent issues to be addressed prior to power
and agency.
Giddens’ theoretical transition can be construed as delineating a social
transformation from the logic of recursivity to that of reflexivity since the
Kuo-Kuei Kao
_______________________________________________________
3
ambivalent logic of reflexivity may account better for the individual psychopathology subversive to social systems. Therefore, Giddens proposes a
reflexive project of the self to counteract social insecurity and anxiety
brought about by institutional reflexivity. The project culminates in his theory
of intimacy and self-identity as “the democratization of personal life,” life
politics as the ideal habitat of the third way politics. 8 Giddens’ utopian
realism here concerns the ambivalent nature of reflexivity which reflects
upon itself and hence splits up from within. Reflexivity comes as the blessing
as well as the peril of our uncertain times.
In consequence, Giddens’ reflexive worldview induces a boomerang effect
that “we are surrounded by areas where we don’t really know what we have
done to existing order of things and what the consequences will be.”9 Seized
by the abyss of thought, late-modern agents including Giddens himself who
are supposed to “act” on the calculation of future risk and trust turn out to be
“narrating” a science fiction of the future as “scenario futures” in “a number
of alternative possible worlds.” 10 Gradually, the Giddensian agent has
become entangled in his own riddle of tying and untying the tension between
recursivity and reflexivity.
2.
An elective affinity between a theory of late-modernity and a theory
of suicide
A. The birth of Giddens’ theory of suicide
Given this reflexive turn, we might conduct a counterfactual genealogy,
tracing a virtual event of “what could have happened” had Giddens early
research on suicide been extrapolated as an early referential frame to his late
theory of reflexive modernity.
To begin with, Giddens developed his study of suicide from 1964/5 with
ad hoc methods and concepts in fragmentary notes and essays. His work
4
Giddens’ Adaptation: Imaginary Suicide in Reflexive Modernity
_______________________________________________________
targets an “attempted type” of suicide in cases where attempted suicides or
suicidal threats act as “a form of social sanction against those towards whom
the individual has a grievance” and “function independently as mechanisms
of social sanctions.”11 For Giddens, the attempted type of suicide should have
a theoretical meaning in its own right beyond circumstantial considerations.
Exploring the perceived meaning of situational factors of a suicide, such as
the failure of attempts due to the method, time and place, are usually deemed
as fruitful to the post-Durkheimain empirical study of suicide. 12 Classical
examples are Stengel’s Suicide and Attempted Suicide (1964) and Douglas’
The Social Meanings of Suicide (1967). Giddens, by contrast, stresses the
ritualized and deliberative dimensions in this type of suicide as an “accepted
method of bringing pressure to bear upon others” and “an attempt bound to
be saved”.13 In a short note, he enumerates nearly a dozen anthropological
examples of attempted or verbal threats of suicide used by aboriginal cultures,
all of which aim to expiate crime through public protest or settle matrimonial
disputes. However, the frame of analysis remains incoherent, flirting with the
anthropological concept of ritual (“social sanction”) and psychological
notions of superego (“pressure on others”), ego (“induce feelings of guilt and
concern”) and the unconscious (“desire to influence others”).
However, the attempted suicide finds no place in Durkheim’s typology.
This is due to Giddens’ ambiguity as he singles out the attempted suicide
from egoistic and anomic types of suicide. Nonetheless, it is conceived as an
exceptional case of altruistic suicide because the attempted type shares the
“ritualized elements” with the altruistic type. Hence, “there does exist another
form of suicide, of a rather different type from ‘altruistic’ suicide, which is
part of a wider social system of punishment and sanction in some societies.” 14
Giddens’ methodological position went through a transition from
anthropology to social-psychology during this early period. 15 In fact, the
Kuo-Kuei Kao
_______________________________________________________
5
focus is on the “interrelationship between personality and social structure.” 16
This social-psychological method is applied in his social-historical study of
the suicide problem in Durkheim’s France. 17 He argues that Durkheim’s
contribution to the problem of suicide should be credited for his theoretical
rather than empirical originality. Moreover, a historical interpretation of
suicide should incorporate individual personality (using the method of casehistory) into social structural analysis. Giddens discusses sociological as well
as psychological models in order to expose the “misconceived ontological
dichotomy” in the Durkheim-Tarde divide and to construct a dualistic relation
between social types and particular individuals. 18
The plot thickened as Giddens focused on egoistic and anomic suicides in
his subsequent study of ‘typology of suicide’, later substantially revised as ‘a
theory of suicide’.19 In his ‘typology of suicide’, only egoistic and anomic
suicides are elaborated. Giddens justifies them as “modern” types that apply
only to “‘industrial’ societies.”20 The manifest aim is to challenge Durkheim’s
structural model from a different empirical and theoretical view. Specifically,
he discusses Durkheim’s ideas of egoism and anomie through two short case
reports (attempted suicide by self-poisoning and suicide by hanging) as well
as long theoretical digressions (mostly Freudian). The outcomes are two
explanatory flowcharts routing possible causal paths in precipitating the two
types of suicide.
Curiously, this essay ends in a convoluted passage. 21 First, Durkheim’s
altruistic suicide is dismissed as a traditional type. Nevertheless, a subtype of
altruistic suicide is retained, while “the anthropological evidence” is
mentioned in passing to discredit the existence of altruism all together even
in traditional societies. With this move, the distinction between modernity
and tradition is suspended in order to bring all suicide cases forward into the
modern types of egoism and anomie. Then, following Halbwach, sacrifice is
6
Giddens’ Adaptation: Imaginary Suicide in Reflexive Modernity
_______________________________________________________
severed resolutely from suicide in order to arrive at an example of the monk’s
suicide (who “consigns himself to the flames in a public and deliberate
altruistic fashion”), which again is one “in other cases” distinguished from
both altruism and sacrifice, but is nevertheless found in “a less open form” in
primary modern types. Here it is difficult to pin down what Giddens tries to
capture. But it’s certain that he endeavors to coin an “attempted type” inside
egoistic and anomic types without the need to build another type to designate
what he needs to articulate. In the meantime, he wants to differentiate this
attempted type from sacrifice and altruism, and yet without losing the sacred
share of altruism.
The central theoretical thesis, methodological operation, and empirical
data in the typology article reappears in ‘a theory of suicide,’ where the
“attempted type” becomes fully developed. Apart from the methodological
integration of Durkheim and Freud, Giddens’ theory of suicide requires
alternative sources to clarify the uncertain nature of the attempted type. These
sources include Stengel, Douglas, Masaryk and Halbwachs. First, Stengel and
Cook’s Attempted Suicide (1958) serves the springboard for Giddens’ interest
in the attempted type since references to them began since the 1964 note.
However, Giddens’ reviews of Stengel’s and Douglas’ studies on suicide
remain critical 22 . He holds that Durkheim’s approach deserves a merit of
social explanation. In ‘a theory of suicide,’ Durkheim and Douglas are both
under a barrage of criticisms. This double negative move leads Giddens to
assimilate “meaning” with “causality” in the conception of suicide.
Specifically, he revises Douglas’ perception of suicide as an action having
situated meanings, as well as Durkheim’s conception of suicide as “an act
carried out by an individual that results in his death, where he knows that his
act will have that result.”23 Just as the causality of meaning is broadened up
to include non-intentional knowing, so the meaning of causality is narrowed
Kuo-Kuei Kao
_______________________________________________________
7
down to agential causality. 24 In result, the “psychological dynamics of
suicide” can be tied up with “social condition” regarded now as the “outcome
of rationalized processes of action.”25 As such, he acknowledges that suicide
is “probably almost universally preceded by” depression although not every
case of depression leads to suicide. 26 Also, egoistic and anomic suicides are
reduced to true types of suicide as “particular types of individual inter-action”
rather than “types of social condition.” 27
In this regard, Giddens’ modernist presumption of individualized isolation
can be traced to Masaryk and Halbwachs. In his introduction to the 1970
English translation of Suicide and the Meaning of Civilization written by the
Czech philosopher-king Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, Giddens outlines a longterm change of mentality about suicide in Masaryk’s time from Greco-Roman
societies onwards, further contextualizing Durkheim’s science. As a whole,
the generations of Masaryk and Durkheim were preoccupied with the
problem of suicide is because it represents the by-product of civilization in
decline of religion and morality.28 In fact, Giddens concurred early on with
Halbwachs’ dissolution of Durkheim’s typology in a more inclusive concept,
“way of life” (genre de vie), which in modern times corresponds to “social
isolation of the individual.”29 The factor of isolation occupied only a partial
place in Giddens’ typology of suicide, referred only to egoistic suicide;
however, isolation turns into a master concept in his theory of suicide,
capable of explaining both types. Besides, an ambiguous discussion about the
relation between Halbwachs’ “isolation” and Durkehim’s “egoism” in the
concluding passage of “the suicide problem in French sociology” published
twice in 1965 and 1971 was deleted in the 1977 revised version. At bottom,
Giddens accepts unreservedly Halbwachs’ analysis that “the social conditions
implicated in the causation of suicide have to be closely bound up with the
motivated, purposive character of human behaviors.” 30 Therefore, Giddens’
8
Giddens’ Adaptation: Imaginary Suicide in Reflexive Modernity
_______________________________________________________
theory of suicide finds its anchor in Halbwachs’ theory of civilization as an
“isolated way of life” in contradistinction to tradition as ritualized “collective
memory.”31
Bearing the historical-theoretical concept of isolation in mind, one can
finally appreciate the significance of the “attempted type.” Previously, we
have seen the elaborate concluding argument in ‘a typology of suicide.’ The
distinction of an attempted suicide from a completed one suggested in the
only two case histories was unclear, while the attempted suicide couldn’t find
any manifest form within the two modern types of suicide. This awkward
situation was largely due to the lack of theoretical and methodological
frameworks. In the final passage of ‘a theory of suicide,’ by contrast, suicide
and attempted suicide become the subtitle and the central argument after a
risk-taking element in all suicidal behaviors has been acknowledged. The aim
is to open up the “contingent event intervening between the attempt itself and
its outcome.” 32 This “contingency” feeds paradoxically on the general
“normativity” of the attempted type under egoism and anomie. The two
modern types of suicide are then rooted in the isolated character of suicidal
actors within the system of interaction. Thus, “the social or moral isolation of
the actor…helps to create his own social milieu at the same time as he is
created by it.” 33 By implication, isolation is no longer a vice of social
morality, but turns into a theoretical-historical condition of possibility for
risk-taking actions. The manifestation of modern suicides in the attempted
type plays around the as if, simulative character, which guarantees the active
performance almost “bound to be saved.”
B. A political theory of late-modernity contra Durkheim
Giddens began his study of suicide since 1964/5 with methods and
concepts still in a sketchy development. It transformed into the sophisticated
Kuo-Kuei Kao
_______________________________________________________
9
methodology and theory of suicide in 1971, and then went through a major
reversal of Durkheim’s structural model into a risk-taking theory of action by
1977/8.
Meanwhile, the reversal was strengthened by Giddens’ ethical-political
interpretation of Durkheim’s thought. The reshaping of Durkheim’s oeuvre
along this line commenced in two seminal essays on political sociology and
moral individualism published in 1971, crystallized in the 1978 textbook on
Durkheim, and matured in the 1986 edition of Durkheim’s political texts. The
appreciation of Durkheim’s ideas of moral individualism and socialist state
paved the way to his subsequent multivolume critique of Marxian historical
materialism. 34 Therefore, the trilogy to recapture Marx’s critical spirit
appeared soon after his radicalization of Durkheim’s thought.35 Eventually,
sufficient conditions of possibility were set for the reflexive turn around 1990.
Advocating change by evolution instead of revolution, Giddens’ form of
politics “beyond left and right” is a result of his appreciation of Durkheim. 36
In fact, later Giddens’ political agenda in a tripartite alliance of reflexive
individualism, systemic nation-states and global governance is an updated
application of Durkheim’s ethical-political horizon, a horizon based on a
particular history of the French dialogical moral-state in contradistinction to
the German militant power-state.
Moreover, a higher purpose is to solve the tension in the two Durkheims
thesis with such ethical politics. Simply put, Giddens refutes the two
Durkheims thesis by highlighting Durkheim’s Bordeaux courses in the years
around 1895, the period of his controversial transition from science to
religion. 37 According to the two Durkheims thesis, Division of Labour in
Society (1893) and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) are
supposed to be set apart. For Giddens, however, Durkheim’s lectures
delivered in the transitional period functions to link the gap between science
10
Giddens’ Adaptation: Imaginary Suicide in Reflexive Modernity
_______________________________________________________
(social change) and morality (religion) through practice (politics and
education), since they deal with problems of authority and sanction in
practical themes such as socialism, family, education and religion.
Giddens’ proposal is to put forward a “coherent Durkheim thesis,” as we
call it, to falsify the two Durkheims thesis invented by Parsons, a consensus
still dominating the Durkheimains, regardless of their positivist, structural
and cultural divisions.38 On the other hand, it is important to stress the fact
that Durkheim in his transitional period between 1895 and 1897 was not only
interested in the issue of politics but also the problem of suicide. In short,
Giddens introduces an elective affinity between the political and the suicidal
images of Durkheim’s social theory in order to turn the schizophrenic
conservative into a rational radical.
Given the case, a reflexive significance comes out of Giddens’
consecutive reworking of the Durkheimian issues of suicide and politics. His
own transition toward reflexive modernity is produced out of this reflection
upon the transitional period of Durkheim’s thought. A greater potential lying
behind Giddens’ research of suicide is its potential to politicize the
connection between suicide and agency. Theoretically, his new theory of
suicide could be easily transposed to agency in a Sysyphusian claim for
power:
[P]ower relations are two-way. This accounts for the intimate tie
between agency and suicide. Self-destruction is a (virtually) alwaysopen option, the ultimate refusal that finally and absolutely cancels
the oppressive power of others; hence suicidal acts themselves can be
understood as concerned with the exercise of power. 39
The doubling of suicide and agency explains why there were no direct
Kuo-Kuei Kao
_______________________________________________________
11
commentaries by Giddens on the problem of suicide since 1979 onwards.
Strictly speaking, already noted in his new rules of sociology, the
Durkheimian problem of suicide was criticized as a positivist exercise
entrapped by the interplay between theoretical and common languages,
unable to capture subjective experiences via objective observation. 40 As the
concept of agency surfaced, suicide further lost its once prominent legitimacy
in the 1979 checklist of sociological central problems, as if the classical case
of suicide had been closed and done with except for the function of display in
the first year sociology textbook. However, this is only the literal
disappearance of completed suicides. Living the consequence of modernity,
the attempted suicide is retained in the counterfactual permutations of
everyday human struggle for identity and intimacy. In the late-modern lifeworld where erotic seduction is superseded by sexual conquests, the transvitalist élan suicidé thrives on the grand narratives of sexualized love and
gendered identity through post-familial couples who cope with codependence, letting-go addictively and tightening-up compulsively at the
same time.41 As intimacy is measured by the principles of democracy, selfidentity is tested by the precipice of “fateful moments”.42 The tragic acts of
“completed suicide” have been displaced by the contingent plays of “suicidal
agency” when reflexive agents strive to maintain and reverse adverse
circumstances in the hours.
3.
Misrecognize the modality of suicide
In view of the elective affinity between Giddens’ theory of late-modernity
and the theory of suicide, three critical comments can be made. First,
associating the suicidal and political images of Durkheim-in-transition, he
comes to endorse the culture of individualization in itself. Giddens bids
farewell to all collectivist ideas of culture, ranging from cybernetic
12
Giddens’ Adaptation: Imaginary Suicide in Reflexive Modernity
_______________________________________________________
integration to symbolic effervescence. His whole intellectual enterprise can
be seen as developing a counter-sociological interpretation of reflexive
individuals. Constructing the theory of reflexive modernity by the secret
route of the theory of suicide, Giddens has to terminate the logic of duality in
his own structuration theory. Since the conceptual efficacy in the duality of
structure does not only rely on agency but also on the symbolic repression of
the suicidal abyss of agency, passing to a reflexive logic blows the whole
social magic. When the suicidal madness behind agency is liberated, the
errant trajectories of reflexive modernity are unfolded. This is largely due to
the abnormal social fact that each and every individual can claim authenticity
for him/herself, and nothing but the truth of the self without exterior sources
of sanctity, authority and legitimacy. Severing the umbilical cord from
classical dualism, Giddens “suicides” the sociological discipline long
established in Durkheimian sociology like an intellectual terrorist. 43 In
consequence, Giddens’ social theory shares a deep-seated complicity with
“the implosion of the social” in Baudrillard’s sense insofar as he endorses a
reversal of Durkheim’s “elementary forms” from the sui-generis of the social
to the suicido-generis of late-modern individuals.
Second, the kernel issue concerns the modality of suicide presupposed in
Giddens’ formulation of reflexive modernity. His implicit identification of the
attempted suicide with reflexive modernity posits an imaginary mode, since
the attempted type of suicide must be sustained by the hypothetical projection
about the future consequences of action or, in Žižek’s words, by “the
imagined scene of the effect his or her act will have on posterity, on it witness,
on the public, on those who will learn about it.” 44 Biographically, it is
plausible to argue that Giddens’ wage on the imaginary modality of suicide
only rewinds the memory of his personal experience of “the cult of the self,”
as Foucault would say, in the late 1960s California. A vivid image of the
Kuo-Kuei Kao
_______________________________________________________
13
imaginary suicide can be seen from Spike Jonze’s 2002 tragic comedy
Adaptation, a sequel to his 1999 Being John Malkovich, in which the manicdepressive character finds himself becoming an ouroboros’ form of life.45
Given the case, he misrecognizes the forward modality of the real suicide for
a backward modality of the imaginary suicide. Insofar as the characteristics
of the real suicide regard “the subject’s full and direct identification with the
object,” “the frame that falls into what it frames,” and eventually “the exact
opposite of the death drive,” the suicidal subject experiences a fetishist
pleasure. 46 As such, the imaginary suicide and the real suicide share a
phenomenological homology: both modalities present themselves away from
the completed acts of suicide, aiming instead at late-modern strategies of
simulation, survival and adaptation. In light of this, Giddens’ existential
displacement of Durkheim’s structural theory of suicide fails to see through
the hyper-reality of reflexive modernity. In effect, Giddens’ misrecognition of
the modality of suicide in reflexive modernity guarantees his constant falling
back on the adaptation to the world that adapts to itself - because in this
virtual world, imaginary suicide reigns death through a self-referential
monitoring of risks and catastrophes; also because in this worldless world,
late-modern individuals are less “united” by the true love of the social than
“connected” by the real terror of death.
From a historical view, finally, Minois demonstrates that the Western
consciousness of liberty and suicide have always been a close couple from
the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Hamlet’s ghostly, ethical selfquestioning has been silenced since the coming of social sciences in the
nineteenth century.47 As such, the “extreme case of euthanasia” signifies a
contemporary challenge of the “thanato-ethics” of cruelty to the bioethics of
suffering.48
14
Giddens’ Adaptation: Imaginary Suicide in Reflexive Modernity
_______________________________________________________
Notes
1 A certain endogenous tension had been picked up by the discordant
descriptions of Giddens’ structuration theory as eclecticism and revisionism
during the 1980s. See for example, F. Dallmayr, The theory of structuration:
a critique, in A. Giddens, Profiles and Critiques in Social Theory, 1982,
London, Macmillan, pp. 18-27; P. Hirst, The social theory of Anthony
Giddens: a new syncretism, Theory, Culture and Society, 1(2), 1982 : 78-82;
M. Gane, Anthony Giddens and the crisis in social theory, Economy and
Society, 11, 1983: 368-398. Afterwards, his reflexive turn provoked
polarized interpretations in the 1990s: it could mean a radical fragmentation
into “theoretical omelettes” on the one hand, and a classical “last
modernist” defense of social order on the other. See I. Craib, Anthony
Giddens, London, Routledge, 1992; S. Městrovic, Anthony Giddens: The
Last Modernist, London, Routledge, 1998.
2 C. Shilling, The Body and Social Theory, London, Sage, 1993, pp. 200-202;
D. Layder, Understanding Social Theory, London, Sage, 1994, pp. 138-142.
3 See A. Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of
Structuration, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1984. Here the structure/agency
debate in contemporary theoretical sociology fails to capture the
complexity of Giddens’ social theory. I am referring to Lockwood’s famous
article first published in 1964 on social and system integrations, and later
developed into various hypotheses from M. Archer’s dualism and J.
Habermas’ first-degree perspectivism to N. Mouzelis’ second-degree
perspectivism and A. Giddens’ duality. In retrospective, the debate of
agency/structure ended up laying the foundation for a legible genre of
British theoretical sociology to emerge out of the American domination
with a positivist micro-macro problematic. But this misleading approach
fails to account for the fact that Giddens’ application of Lockwood’s thesis
operates at the conceptual interface between structure and system instead of
between agency and structure. After all, the dual relation between structure
and agency has been conjoined through a skillful mixture of structuralism
and ethnomethodology as the building block towards structuration theory.
See A. Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and
Contradiction in Social Analysis, London, Macmillan, 1979: pp. 49-73; p.
66; 77.
4 A. Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory, pp. 123-130.
5 A. Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory, pp. 53-59; The
Constitution of Society, pp. 5-14; 41-45; 78-83.
6 A. Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory, p. 78.
7 For a formal definition of systemic reflexivity in the sense of a reflexive
self-regulation by knowledge, see A. Giddens, The Constitution of Society,
Kuo-Kuei Kao
_______________________________________________________
15
p. 376. This is a neutralized interpretation (more Weberian than Marxist) of
Foucault’s idea of social scientific knowledge, which is exemplified in a
case of educational reform to underlie “the two most pervasive types of
social mobilization in modern times: the legal-rational social organization
and the secular social movement.” See A. Giddens, Central Problems in
Social Theory, p. 79.
8 A. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late
Modern Age, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1991; A. Giddens, The
Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern
Societies, Cambridge, Polity, 1992; A. Giddens, Beyond Left and Right: The
Future of Radical Politics,Oxford, Polity Press, 1994.
9 A. Giddens & C. Pierson, Conversations with Anthony Giddens: Making
Sense of Modernity, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1998, p. 114.
10 A. Giddens in The Contemporary Giddens: Social Theory in A
Globalizing Age, edited by C. Bryant & D. Jary, Basingstoke, Palgrave—
then Macmillan, 2001, pp. 244-245.
11 A. Giddens, Suicide, attempted suicide, and the suicidal threat, Man: a
Record of Anthropological Science, 64 (article 136), 1964, p. 115.
12 S. Taylor, Durkheim and the Study of Suicide, London, Macmillam, 1982.
13 A. Giddens, Suicide, attempted suicide, and the suicidal threat, p. 116.
14 A. Giddens, Suicide, attempted suicide, and the suicidal threat, p. 115.
15 A. Giddens, The present position of social psychology, British Journal of
Sociology, 16, 1965, pp. 365-372; A. Giddens, Suicide, British Journal of
Sociology, 16, 1965, pp. 164-165; Theoretical problems in the sociology
of suicide, Advancement of Science, 21, 1965, pp. 522-526.
16 A. Giddens, The present position of social psychology, p. 171.
17 A. Giddens, The suicide problem in French sociology, British Journal of
Sociology, 16, 1965, pp. 3-18, reprinted in The Sociology of Suicide: A
Selection of Readings, edited by A. Giddens, Cass, 1971, pp. 36-51.
18 A. Giddens, The suicide problem in French sociology, pp. 44-45.
19 A. Giddens, A typology of suicide, Archive Europeénes de Sociologie, 7,
1966, pp. 276-295, reprinted in The Sociology of Suicide: A Selection of
Readings, edited by A. Giddens, Cass, 1971, pp. 97-120; A. Giddens, A
theory of suicide, substantially revised from A typology of suicide to be
printed in Studies in Social and Political Thought, edited by A. Giddens,
London, Hutchinson, 1977, pp. 297-321.
20 A. Giddens, A typology of suicide, p. 116.
21 A. Giddens, A typology of suicide, pp. 116-117.
22 A. Giddens, Suicide, p. 164; Review of Douglas, The Social Meanings of
Suicide, Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, Sociology, 3, 1969, p.
266.
23 A. Giddens, A theory of suicide, pp. 301-304.
16
Giddens’ Adaptation: Imaginary Suicide in Reflexive Modernity
_______________________________________________________
24 A. Giddens, Durkheim, London, Fontana, pp. 118-119.
25 A. Giddens, A theory of suicide, p. 312.
26 A. Giddens, A theory of suicide, p. 308.
27 A. Giddens, A theory of suicide, p. 312.
28 A. Giddens, Introduction to T. Masaryk, Suicide and the Meaning of
Civilization, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1970, p. xli.
29 A. Giddens, Foreword to M. Halbwachs, The Causes of Suicide, London,
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978, pp. xvi-xx; A. Giddens, The suicide
problem in French sociology, p. 47.
30 A. Giddens, Foreword, p. xx.
31 A. Giddens, Foreword, p. xvi; A. Giddens & C. Pierson, Conversations
with Anthony Giddens, p. 128.
32 A. Giddens, A theory of suicide, p. 321.
33 A. Giddens, A theory of suicide, p. 314.
34 A. Giddens, Durkheim’s political sociology, Sociological Review, 19,
1971, pp. 477-519, reprinted in Studies in Social and Political Thought,
edited by A. Giddens, London, Hutchinson, 1977, pp. 235-172;
A. Giddens, The individual in the writings of Emile Durkheim, Archive
Europeénes de Sociologies, 12, 1971, pp. 210-228, reprinted in Studies in
Social and Political Thought, London, Hutchinson, edited by A. Giddens,
1977, pp. 273-290.
35 A. Giddens, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism,
vol. 1, Power, Property and the State, London, Macmillan, 1981; A.
Giddens, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, vol.2, The
Nation-State and Violence, London, Polity Press, 1985; A. Giddens,
Beyond Left and Right.
36 Durkheim on Politics and the State, edited by A. Giddens, London, Polity
Press, 1986, pp. 1-31.
37 A. Giddens, Durkheim, pp. 16-19; 49-50; 63-64; 80-82.
38 The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim, edited by J. Alexander & P.
Smith, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 1-31. However,
this is not to say that Giddens “solves” the problem of suicide, much less
the Durkheimian issue of transition. Nor does this imply that
Durkheimians have been ignorant of the problem of suicide in Durkheim’s
thought. See M. Gane, On Durkheim’s Rules of Sociological Method,
London, Routledge, 1988. There is likely an unbridgeable void in
Durkheim’s thought a-voided by both parties in the two Durkheims thesis.
In particular, this void causes the enduring attraction of Durkheim’s
problematic of suicide more than one century later, regardless of Giddens’
shrewd proposal. See Durkheim’s Suicide: A Century of Research and
Debate, edited by W. S. F. Pickering & G. Walford, London, Routledge,
2000.
Kuo-Kuei Kao
_______________________________________________________
17
39 A. Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory, p. 149.
40 A. Giddens, New Rules of Sociological Method: A Positive
Critique of Interpretative Sociologies, 2nd edn, Cambridge, Polity Press,
1993, pp. 138-141.
41 A. Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy, pp. 49-110.
42 A. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, pp. 109-143.
43 See J. Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism and Other Essays, London:
Verso, 2003, p. 65.
44 S. Žižek, The Fragile Absolute, or Why is the Christian Legacy Worth
Fighting for? London, Verso, 2000, p. 28.
45 Compare J. Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or The Lucidity Pact,
Oxford, Berg, 2005, p. 59; S. Žižek, The Fragile Absolute, pp. 50-54.
46 S. Žižek, The Fragile Absolute, pp. 21-24; 28-29.
47 G. Minois, History of Suicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture,
Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999, p. 325.
48 G. Minois, History of Suicide, p. 328.
Kao, Kuo-Kuei (Pascal) is conducting his PhD research in the Department of
Social Sciences, Loughborough University, United Kingdom. His thesis is
about the genealogy of sociology and love.