The sense everywhere of having nowhere to go is surely symptomatic of reflexive modernity, a global risk society whose predicament is defined by Ulrich Beck as "unintentional self-dissolution or self-endangerment" (Beck, Giddens, and Lash 176). As NJ puts it to the comatose Popo after Minmin left home, "I am not sure about anything these days. Every morning, I wake up feeling uncertain." "If you were me," he asks Popo, "would you like to wake up?" The vanishing certainty about old social structures entails the use of a new decentralized expert system, according to Anthony Giddens, wherein the reflexivity and circularity of social know-how can help the subject change her condition of action (ibid., 187). (p. 262)
Ironically, the loss of holistic vision results from a contemporary suffusion of vision, a vision of life burdened with sensorial overload and its absolute satisfaction. "The relentless saturation of any remaining voids," as Jameson notes,"[exposes the postmodern body] to a perpetual barrage of immediacy from which all sheltering layers have been removed" (1988: 351). (p. 263)
(Chapter 12: Concentricity, Teleology, and Reflexive Modernity in Edward Yang's Yi Yi by David Leiwei Li)