Life politics, body and self

Today, some quarter of a century after Friedan's pathbreaking book first appeared, it has become obvious that many of the issues which at first seemed to concern only women are actually bound up with the relational phenomenon of gender identity. What gender identity is, and how it should be expressed, has become itself a matter of multiple options -- ranging up to and including even the choice of whether a person remains anatomically of the same sex into which she or he was born. The politics of self-identity, of course, is not limited to matters of gender differentiation. The more we reflexively `make ourselves' as persons, the more the very category of what a `person' or `human being' is comes to the fore. Many examples can be found to illustrate how and why this is so. For instance, current debates about abortion might seem limited to the body and the rights the body's `owner' might or might not have over its products. But discussions of abortion also turn in some part on whether or not a foetus is a person and, if so, at what point in its development it can be counted as one. In this issue, as so often in the areas of life politics, we find conjoined problems of philosophical definition, human rights and morality.

As the case of abortion indicates, it is not always easy to distinguish life-political questions concerning self-identity from those that focus more specifically on the body. Like the self the

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body can no longer be taken as a fixed -- a physiological entity -- but has become deeply involved with modernity's reflexivity. The body used to be one aspect of nature, governed in a fundamental way by processes only marginally subject to human intervention. The body was a `given', the often inconvenient and inadequate seat of the self. With the increasing invasion of the body by abstract systems all this becomes altered. The body, like the self, becomes a site of interaction, appropriation and reappropriation, linking reflexively organised processes and systematically ordered expert knowledge. The body itself has become emancipated -- the condition for its reflexive restructuring. Once thought to be the locus of the soul, then the centre of dark, perverse needs, the body has become fully available to be `worked upon' by the influences of high modernity. As a result of these processes, its boundaries have altered. It has, as it were, a thoroughly permeable `outer layer' through which the reflexive project of the self and externally formed abstract systems routinely enter. In the conceptual space between these, we find more and more guidebooks and practical manuals to do with health, diet, appearance, exercise, lovemaking and many other things.

Reflexive appropriation of bodily processes and development is a fundamental element of life-political debates and struggles. It is important to emphasise this point in order to see that the body has not become just an inert entity, subject to commodification or `discipline' in Foucault's sense. If such were the case, the body would be primarily a site of emancipatory politics: the point would then be to free the body from the oppression to which it had fallen prey. In conditions of high modernity, the body is actually far less `docile' than ever before in relation to the self, since the two become intimately coordinated within the reflexive project of self-identity. The body itself -- as mobilised in praxis -- becomes more immediately relevant to the identity the individual promotes. As Melucci observes,

the return to the body initiates a new search for identity. The body appears as a secret domain, to which only the individual holds the key, and to which he or she can return to seek a self-definition unfettered by the rules and expectations of society. Nowadays the social attribution of identity invades all areas traditionally protected by the barrier of `private space'. ¹⁰

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We can recognise the problem of `ownership' of the body as one distinctive issue posed by its double involvement with abstract systems and the reflexive project of the self. As was mentioned before, `ownership' here is a complex notion bringing in all the problems of defining a `person'. In the sphere of life politics, this problem includes how the individual is to make choices concerning strategies of bodily development in life-planning, as well as who is to determine the `disposal' of bodily products and bodily parts.

Body and self are linked in another fundamental domain that has become thoroughly penetrated by the internally referential systems of modernity: reproduction. The term `reproduction' can be used to refer both to social continuity and to the biological continuance of the species. The terminological connection is not accidental: `biological' reproduction is by now wholly social, that is, evacuated by abstract systems and reconstituted through the reflexivity of the self. Reproduction clearly was never solely a matter of external determinism: in all pre-modern cultures various kinds of contraceptive methods, for example, have been used. Nonetheless, for the most part the sphere of reproduction belonged irremediably to the arena of fate. With the advent of more or less fail-safe methods of contraception, reflexive control over sexual practices and the introduction of reproductive technologies of various kinds, reproduction is now a field where plurality of choice prevails.

The `end of reproduction as fate' is closely tied in to the `end of nature'. For until now reproduction has always been at one pole of human involvement with separated nature -- death being at the other. Genetic engineering, whose potentialities have only just begun to be tapped, represents a further dissolution of reproduction as a natural process. Genetic transmission can be humanly determined by this means, thus breaking the final tie connecting the life of the species to biological evolution. In this process of the disappearance of nature, emergent fields of decision-making affect not just the direct process of reproduction, but the physical constitution of the body and the manifestations of sexuality. Such fields of action thus relate back to questions of gender and gender identity, as well as to other processes of identity formation.

Reproductive technologies alter age-old oppositions between fertility and sterility. Artificial insemination and in vitro fertilisation

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more or less completely separate reproduction from the traditional categories of heterosexual experience. The sterile can be made fertile, but various permutations of surrogate parenthood are also thus made possible. The opportunity offered for gay couples, for instance, to produce and rear children is only one among various lifestyle options flowing from these innovations. The fact that sexuality no longer need have anything to do with reproduction -- or vice versa -- serves to reorder sexuality in relation to lifestyles (although, as always, in large degree only through the medium of reflexive appropriation).

The variety of options now introduced, or likely to be developed soon, in the area of reproductive technologies provides a signal example of the opportunities and problems of life politics. The birth of Louise Brown, on 25 July, 1978, marked a new transition in human reproduction. The creation of new life -- rather than the negative control of life through contraception -- for the first time became a matter of deliberate construction. In vitro fertilisation (IVF) uses many techniques which have been around for some while, but certain key innovations have allowed these to be used to fertilise a human egg outside the body. A further development is pre-implantation sex screening. By means of IVF methods, it is possible to transfer an already `sexed' embryo to a woman's womb by DNA amplification techniques. Male and female embryos can be distinguished by such techniques, and an embryo of the desired sex implanted. To these techniques can be added embryo freezing. This process allows embryos to be stored for an indefinite length of time, permitting multiple pregnancies without the need for further ovary stimulation and egg collection. Thus it is possible, for example, for identical twins to be born years apart from one another.

Further developments which look at least feasible in the control of human reproduction include ectogenesis and cloning. Ectogenesis is the creation of human life entirely outside the body: the production of children without pregnancy. Cloning, the creation of a number of genetically identical individuals, although perhaps more bizarre, appears closer at hand, and has already been achieved in animal experiments. ¹¹

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Date: 2016-04-22; view: 1055