Summary: the agenda of life politics

Life-political issues place a question mark against the internally referential systems of modernity. Produced by the emancipatory impact of modern institutions, the life-political agenda exposes the limits of decision-making governed purely by internal criteria. For life politics brings back to prominence precisely those moral and existential questions repressed by the core institutions of modernity. Here we see the limitations of accounts of `postmodernity'

-- 224 --

developed under the aegis of poststructuralism. According to such views, moral questions become completely denuded of meaning or relevance in current social circumstances. But while this perspective accurately reflects aspects of the internally referential systems of modernity, it cannot explain why moral issues return to the centre of the agenda of life politics. Life-political issues cannot be debated outside the scope of abstract systems: information drawn from various kinds of expertise is central to their definition. Yet because they centre on questions of how we should live our lives in emancipated social circumstances they cannot but bring to the fore problems and questions of a moral and existential type. Life-political issues supply the central agenda for the return of the institutionally repressed. They call for a remoralising of social life and they demand a renewed sensitivity to questions that the institutions of modernity systematically dissolve.

We are now in a position to sum up and systemise the preceding discussion. The agenda of life politics derives from the extension of the internally referential systems of modernity to cover several distinct areas. The invasion of the natural world by abstract systems brings nature to an end as a domain external to human knowledge and involvements. The tremendous extension of human control over nature (which, as in other areas of control, yields new unpredictabilities) comes up against its limits, however. These consist not so much in the environmental degradation and disruption that is thus brought about, as in the stimulus to reintroduce parameters of debate external to modernity's abstract systems. In other words, repressed existential issues, related not just to nature but to the moral parameters of existence as such, press themselves back on to the agenda. The process is not an automatic one: on the level of everyday life, as well as in collective struggles, moral/existential problems are actively recovered and brought forward into public debate. The specific moral arena of such debates concerns, not just what should be done for human beings to survive in nature, but how existence itself should be grasped and `lived': this is Heidegger's `question of Being'. The `end of nature' opens up many new issues for consideration because the field of intrinsic organisation has become so extensive. As with other substantive moral questions,

-- 225 --

these all in some way involve lifestyle options. All pose difficult analytical problems as well as moral dilemmas.

A second area is biological reproduction. From the point of view of the dominant outlook of modernity, reproduction is a mechanical phenomenon -- a matter of genetic processes. But looked at morally, reproduction raises the question of existential contradiction. The main moral arena here concerns transcendence: how human beings should approach the question of their own finitude. As in each of the other domains, how more substantial moral issues bearing on lifestyle options are approached is likely to depend on how the wider questions of existential contradiction and finitude are handled. The problem of what rights a foetus has, for example, is strongly influenced by what one takes `life' to represent, as a moral as well as an analytic issue.

Globalisation represents a third focus for the expansion of modernity's internally referential systems. The emergence of globalised orders, as has been stressed in this study, means that the world we live `in' today is different from that of previous ages. Globalisation unifies the overall human community -- in some part because of the creation of high-consequence risks which no one living on the earth can escape. New forms of cooperation are called for; although generally acknowledged, in a world of distinct nation-states they are as yet only weakly developed. Given the high-consequence risk factors, the substantive moral questions which arise are partly of a `containing' kind. Should we declare exceptions to the principle of radical doubt? Should there be limits to the unfettered pursuit of scientific enquiry? Should the possession of nuclear weapons be condemned as morally indefensible? Such questions affect our `existence' in the concrete sense that they bear on the survival of humanity as a whole. Yet they also connect with more elementary existential issues of intersubjectivity.

Finally, we return to self-identity, focused through the internally referential systems of self and body. Thoroughly penetrated by modernity's abstract systems, self and body become the sites of a variety of new lifestyle options. In so far as it is dominated by the core perspectives of modernity, the project of the self remains one of control, guided only by a morality of `authenticity'. However, concerning as it does the most intimate human sensibilities,

-- 226 --

this project becomes a fundamental impetus towards a remoralising of daily life. Substantive questions on the agenda of life politics centre upon rights of personhood and individuality, which connect back to the existential dimensions of self-identity as such.

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 798