Television and Everyday Life

TELEVISION AND ONTOLOGICAL SECURITY
Anthony Giddens’ discussion of what he terms ‘ontological security’ is a central
component of his overall project of providing a theoretical basis for the
understanding of social life in the modern world. That theory, which he calls
structuration theory, takes both its start and its end points from the familiar but
intractable core problem in sociology: the problem of structure and agency. It
is not my intention to discuss what has become an extremely extensive and
intensive body of work. But in abstracting one element of it, I need to
acknowledge that I may be guilty of a decontextualisation that shifts or
undermines its status in his own writing.
Giddens defines ontological security in the following way:
[Ontological security] refers to the confidence that most human beings have
in the continuity of their self-identity and in the constancy of the surrounding
social and material environments of action. A sense of the reliability of
persons and things, so central to the notion of trust, is basic to feelings of
ontological security; hence the two are psychologically related. Ontological
security has to do with ‘being’ or, in the terms of phenomenology, ‘being-
in-the-world.’ But it is an emotional, rather than a cognitive, phenomenon,
and it is rooted in the unconscious.
(Giddens, 1990, 92)
There are a number of different, but equally important, elements in what he
calls the ‘project’ (1989, 279) of ontological security. Let me consider a number
of them.
The first is the necessary interrelationship between ontological security and
trust, as individual and social aspects of the same basic and universal
phenomenon. Before I can have confidence in you, Giddens is saying, I have
to have confidence in myself. But, as we shall see, having confidence in myself
requires a developmental process in which I have learnt to have confidence in
others. This mutually reflective process of I-me-you relations is fundamental
to the constitution of society, (the title of one of Giddens’ recent books), indeed
of all societies, and it is well explored in classic social, social-psychological
theory and psychoanalytic theory (Mead, Cooley, Erickson, Laing, Winnicott
etc.). But Giddens’ version of it is not just an abstraction, and its own ontological
claims cannot be confined to the ethereal visions of grand social theory. For,
as he argues, both trust and ontological security are the product of an active
engagement in the world, of an active engagement in the events and patterns

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Television and Everyday Life
and relationships of everyday life. That active engagement is physical; it requires
bodily presence, face-to-face interactions, communication, language. It is
cognitive; it requires understanding, memory, reflexivity, an awareness of
position in time and space. And it is affective; our relationships to material
objects, to other people and to symbols are grounded in unconscious processes,
but can only be sustained through a confidence, born of experience, in the
certainty of the world—that is, in a kind of faith. This is a kind of faith because
confidence has to be sustained through its dependence, particularly in modern
society, on ‘a sense of security in responses of others removed in time and
space’ (Giddens, 1989, 278).
Trust, the precondition, for ontological security and for our capacity to sustain
an active anxiety-controlling engagement in the everyday world is defined as:
‘confidence in the reliability of a person or system, regarding a given set of
outcomes or events where that confidence expresses a faith in the probity or
love of another, or in the correctness of abstract principles (technical
knowledge)’ (Giddens, 1990, 34). That confidence in turn implies the ability
to manage, counteract or minimise the various threats and dangers that appear
to challenge us, both as individuals and as collectivities. It is the