Connections and implications

What is the sense of `politics' in `life polities'? It is conventional in political theory to recognise a narrow and a broad conception of politics. The first refers to processes of decision-making within the governmental sphere of the state; the second sees as political any modes of decision-making which are concerned with settling debates or conflicts where opposing interests or values clash. Life politics is politics in both of these senses.

The narrow sense of politics survives because of the central position which the nation-state and its governmental apparatus continue to hold. A nation-state cannot effectively legislate about issues of life politics so as to produce decisions binding on broader social communities. Thus, for example, a decision to control research into genetic engineering in one state would make little impact on scientific developments in this area globally. A government might decide to ban nuclear power within its own territories, but this act would hardly protect its population in an acceptable way if other countries nearby maintained their nuclear power sources. Yet all issues of life politics involve questions of rights and obligations, and the state thus far continues to be the main administrative locus within which these are settled in law. Life-political issues are likely to assume greater and greater importance in the public and juridical arenas of states. Demands for emancipatory rights, as stressed earlier, do not thereby become any less important. Attempts to extend and sustain citizenship rights, for example, remain fundamental; such rights provide the arenas within which life-political issues can be openly debated.

In the broader sense of politics, life-political issues permeate many areas of social life in later modernity. For numerous spheres of choice on the individual level and collectively are opened up by the extension of abstract systems and the socialisation

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Existential Questions and Life Politics

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of natural processes. It is not my aim to trace out in any detail the likely institutional parameters of life politics in this wider sense. Social movements have played a basic role in bringing life-political issues to the fore, and forcing them on public attention. Whether such movements are harbingers of organisational changes in the domains of political activity is a moot question. ¹³ In late modernity, where reflexive attempts to colonise the future are more or less universal, many types of individual action and organisational involvement might shape life-political issues. Life-political problems do not fit readily within existing frameworks of politics, and may well stimulate the emergence of political forms which differ from those hitherto prominent, both within states and on a global level.

Thus far, emancipatory politics has been described as though it were merely the preparation for the emergence of life politics. The relation between emancipatory and life politics is, of course, more complicated than such a view would suggest. Emancipatory politics will not come to an end as life politics moves to claim more of the overall political agenda; virtually all questions of life politics also raise problems of an emancipatory sort. In late modernity, access to means of self-actualisation becomes itself one of the dominant focuses of class division and the distribution of inequalities more generally. Capitalism, one of the great driving forces in the expansion of modernity, is a class system which tends to generate major material inequalities -- on a global scale as well as within the economically developed societies. The emancipatory struggles which have helped moderate the polarising effects of `unfettered' capitalist markets are hence directly relevant to the pursuit of life-political endeavours.

Emancipatory politics often does more than simply `prepare the stage' for life-political concerns. We can explore some possible connections by means of examples. Let me concentrate on two: feminism and the divisions between First and Third World nations.

The women's movement has clear emancipatory objectives. Its aims are to free women from traditional forms of constraint and allow them to participate on an equal level with men in areas of social activity formerly dominated by males. In the first years of the movement, as was indicated earlier, emancipatory interests were clearly in the ascendancy. Yet other concerns were also

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present from early on. When the women's movement gained its initial momentum in the nineteenth century, some individuals were already proposing that more than sheer emancipation was at stake. Making the voices of women heard, they proposed, would both need far-reaching changes in the actual organisation of social life and bring them about. When women eventually entered the male-dominated sectors of society on an equal basis with men, they would bring with them values and attitudes that would profoundly reshape those male domains.

Among other changes, the emancipation of women, it has been suggested, might influence levels of aggressiveness in society, and might help transform pre-existing attitudes towards the natural environment. Thus feminists early and late have drawn attention to the fact that military power and warfare are quintessentially male domains. Traditional warrior values were always male values, standing opposed to the concerns of women with nurturance in the household and in the family. Most armies, until recent times at any rate, have consisted exclusively of men, and combat on the battlefield has also been a resolutely male affair. Perhaps, therefore, military power and the propensity to war, even in a nuclear age, are bound up directly with male aggressiveness? After all, males specialise in violence: rape, like war, is almost exclusively a male activity. ¹⁴ As women become more equal with men, and particularly as they become more and more prominent in public spheres, they may alter the value systems which have been created by men and which underlie warfare and male aggression. Women, it has been claimed, will incorporate nurturing values into arenas of life which were previously subjected by men to their own, more violent, ways of doing things. ¹⁵

Promethean attitudes to nature, technology, and even science itself, it has been argued by some feminist authors, also reflect male orientations. Men's attitude towards the world is essentially an instrumental one, based on domination and manipulation. The outlook of women is characteristically different, and women hence relate in a contrasting way to the natural environment. ¹⁶ Mothering and the other nurturant tasks in which women are involved link them to natural reproductive processes much more closely than men. The socialisation of biology and reproduction would, from this perspective, be seen as a further intrusion of male control into these essentially feminine concerns.

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In emancipating themselves from male domination, by their very presence women would alter human relations to nature.

These theses are controversial, and are rejected by many. ¹⁷ The idea that women would, through their emancipation, substantially alter the nature of military power or the socialisation of nature founders if `essentialist' theories of gender difference are discarded. For, as many feminist writers would now argue, there are no generic differences between `men' and `women'; differences within these categories often override what is shared in common by men or women respectively. Whether or not these conceptions are valid, however, is not what really matters in this context. The point is that we can envisage circumstances in which, because of the changes which ensue from achieving it, emancipation directly affects life-political issues.

Consider in this regard the divisions between First and Third World nations. No one can doubt that reducing global inequalities is essential if long-term global security is to be won. An emancipatory process must be set in motion, although at the moment the mechanisms whereby this might be achieved are not very apparent. It seems difficult to suppose that the disparities between rich and poor countries could be reduced through further global industrialisation on a large scale. Not only would such a process produce a still greater deterioration in global ecology, sufficient resources simply do not exist for the world's population to adopt ways of life comparable to those of the First World societies. Thus a process of emancipation on the part of the world's poor could probably only be achieved if radical lifestyle changes were introduced in the developed countries. Emancipation presumes life-political transformation.

Are there any general formulae connecting emancipatory and life politics? Marx provided one, when he worked out his celebrated formulation of `the Jewish Question'. ¹⁸ Those who fought for the emancipation of the Jews from religious oppression and persecution were not, Marx asserted, struggling for purely sectional interests. For in freeing the Jews from such oppression, they were liberating human beings as a whole. In Marx's argument, this was a generalised freedom from the constraints of religion. But one might generalise the principle yet further: struggles to emancipate oppressed groups can help liberate others

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by promoting attitudes of mutual tolerance which in the end could benefit everyone.

The emergence of life politics, I have argued, results from the centrality of the reflexive project of the self in late modernity, coupled to the contradictory nature of the extension of modernity's internally referential systems. The capability of adopting freely chosen lifestyles, a fundamental benefit generated by a post-traditional order, stands in tension, not only with barriers to emancipation, but with a variety of moral dilemmas. No one should underestimate how difficult it will be to deal with these, or even how hard it is to formulate them in ways likely to command widespread consensus. ¹⁹ How can we remoralise social life without falling prey to prejudice? The more we return to existential issues, the more we find moral disagreements; how can these be reconciled? If there are no transhistorical ethical principles, how can humanity cope with clashes of `true believers' without violence? Responding to such problems will surely require a major reconstruction of emancipatory politics as well as the pursuit of life-political endeavours.

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Date: 2016-04-22; view: 847