Modernity and Self-Identity Quotes

“The reflexivity of the self, in conjunction with the influence of abstract systems, pervasively affects the body as well as psychic processes. The body is less and less an extrinsic ‘given’, functioning outside the internally referential systems of modernity, but becomes itself reflexively mobilized. What might appear as a
wholesale movement towards the narcissistic cultivation of bodily appearance is in fact an expression of a concern lying much
deeper actively to ‘construct’ and control the body.”
― Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age