5 Projects of the self/Projects of the state

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Governmentality

“As already mentioned several times, it is very important to cultivate a sense of justice and fairness that is impressed by good acts and repelled by bad ones, an attitude of willingness to put this sense of justice into practice, a sense of consideration for others, a sense of respect for life and human rights, a spirit that is moved by beautiful things and a willingness to engage in volunteer activities. In addition, in the context of school education, there is a particular need to activate the qualities required for group living and to make still further efforts to cultivate an ethical perspective as embodied in basic social morality and social awareness expressed in, for example, the acquisition of rules for the formation of desirable human relationships or social living...”
(MONBUSHO 1997)

The connection between the cultural imaginations and the bodies of persons residing in a nation-state with the social programs of the modern state has become a key area of debate about the qualities of and changes within modernity itself. Foucault (1991) used the transformation of this connection via a change in what he called “governmentality” to mark the advent of modernity. The invention of modern “populations” and of a “pastoral” governmentality informs his description of modern nation-state creation.

In this perspective, the state is the shepherd that watches over his (gender marker intentional here) national population flock, with an eye to maximal productivity including the reduction of maverick individualities. The techniques required to perform this state function were provided by instrumental advances in statistics and surveillance, and the development of disciplinary regimes (in barracks, factories, schools, and prisons). These instruments work to the advantage¹ of the state and against the interests of a collective, public (democratic) control over the state.

It is not at all unusual in current nation-states for governments and corporations to offer advice about and models for the social behavior of their citizens/workers. In 1996 in the United States a new think-tank was created to ponder a decline in “civility” within the nation’s population. The Penn National Commission on Society, Culture and Community at the University of Pennsylvania focuses the talents of several dozen experts on issues of uncivil public behavior, the failure of leadership and the fragmentation of communities (See: http://www.upenn.edu/pnc). Its findings are meant to inform public policy at the national level.

The agencies of mass, popular education in virtually every modern state have been seen as venues within which to teach basic social values. In Japan, the Ministry of Education (monbusho) takes the lead role in pursuing this use of the national public education system. As in many other nations, social values are also then described as proper to the citizens of that nation: the individual is taught how to behave within a national community of fellow citizens.

At the same time, as Walter Lippmann pointed out back in 1937 (262-263), education in a democracy must also take place outside of government-controlled schools and market-led journals in order for the citizenry to avoid the tautology of trying to govern the state and the market with only the knowledge that the state and the market provide to them. A “...democracy,” he noted, “must have a way of life which educates the people for the democratic way of life” (Lippmann 1937, 263).

“The concern with lifestyle, with the stylization of life, suggests that the practices of consumption, the planning, purchase and display of consumer goods and experiences in everyday life cannot be understood merely via conceptions of exchange value and instrumental rational calculation. The instrumental and expressive dimensions should not be regarded as exclusive either/or polarities, rather they can be conceived as a balance which consumer culture brings together. It is therefore possible to speak of a calculating hedonism, a calculus of the stylistic effect and an emotional economy on the one hand, and an aestheticization of the instrumental or functional rational dimension via the promotion of an aestheticizing distancing on the other. Rather than unreflexively adopting a lifestyle, through tradition or habit, the new heroes of consumer culture make lifestyle a life project and display their individuality and sense of style in the particularity of the assemblage of goods, clothes, practices, experiences, appearance and bodily dispositions they design together into a lifestyle”
(Featherstone 1991, 86).

What distinguishes the nation-formation programs in state-nation modern societies is an additional magnitude of imagined national commonality; an intimate, normalized, national lifestyle. Lifestyle patterns in nation-state societies tend to be distributed among and informed by non-governmental societal groups or by the (increasingly transnational) marketplace [see also: State-nation modernity].

Under nation-state modernity, the state (central and/ or local) may inform popular instruction in “social values.” By this, the state provides inputs to social behavior, or supplies social/legal constraints that hedge in social behavior. Under conditions of state-nation modernity, instruction extends from lessons on social morality, to actual lifestyle behaviors—informing the behavioral outcome itself. Proper behavior becomes unmarked as correctly learned, nationally coded—and naturalized—and normal(ized) behavior. Individual variations in behavior become marked as both unnatural, and un-national. The potential level of behavioral uniformity is much greater than that possible under conditions of nation-state modernity, where competing group identities mark conflicting behaviors. The central state under state-nation modernity has available to it the instrumentalities of what Foucault called “biopolitics,” which first combined in the “endeavor...to rationalize the problems presented to governmental practice by the phenomena characteristic of a group of living human beings constituted as a population: health, sanitation, birthrate, longevity, race...” (1997, 73). Here I would also add “social behavior” as this is linked to populations. Issues of the margins of population behavior, that is, of criminality and insanity, can be shunted to penal and medical expert systems, but the problem of informing the norms for behavior still remain, and the remaining question becomes that of territory: should the state monitor, control and inform a normative behavior for the nation’s population?

lifestyle and state-nation modernity

One of the features of State-nation modernity, a feature that is only an extension of the state-nation governmentality in this area, is that the state takes upon itself the task of training the social behavior of its population. Mass public education is pursued not simply to provide social and cultural literacy, but also a moral education. And a central task of this training involves interactions within the economy: i.e., lifestyle.

“Schools should develop a form of education in which there is an appropriate balance between knowledge, morals and physical health and should aim to cultivate people who are imbued with a rich sense of humanity and a strong and vigorous physique”
(Monbusho report 1997).

The state under conditions of state-nation modernity will articulate its plans for national life-style goals (a notion that would not even occur to states under conditions of nation-state modernity) through state programs for the environment, sports, the arts, leisure, education, health and welfare, etc. National costumes and traditional forms of music and dance also receive state support.

Such fine-scale control over individual lives and life-styles have been reported in the former Soviet Union, and elsewhere, and have been accomplished in various degrees in all nations where state-nation modernity has developed. In fact there is no better example of biopower than in projects of the state where the spaces and times and practices of individuals at work, at home, and at play become interests of the state.

There are also places where such projects of the state are mostly absent. Spaces where state governmentalities do not penetrate into the intimate spheres of life. But if the state does not exert control in these areas of life, what and who will govern the self?

Projects of the self

In Modernity and Self Identity, Anthony Giddens explores the connections between globalized (and -izing) processes of modernity and an emerging politics based upon lifestyle choices, rather than on broader social change. His writings about “life politics” describe the emergence of this under conditions of what he calls “late-modernity.” In fact, this emergence is one of the hallmarks of late- (he prefers this to post-) modernity. In the following, he lays out his notion of life politics, and links this to practices centered on “the reflexive project of the self.”

“Life politics presumes (a certain level of) emancipation, in both the main senses noted above emancipation from the fixities of tradition and from conditions of hierarchical domination. It would be too crude to say simply that life politics focuses on what happens once individuals have achieved a certain level of autonomy of action, because other factors are involved but this provides at least an initial orientation. Life politics does not primarily concern the conditions which liberate us in order to make choices: it is a politics of choice. While emancipatory politics is a politics of life chances, life politics is a politics of lifestyle. Life politics is the politics of a reflexively mobilised order—the system of late modernity—which, on an individual and collective level, has radically altered the existential parameters of social activity. It is a politics of self-actualisation in a reflexively ordered environment, where that reflexivity links self and body to systems of global scope. In this arena of activity, power is generative rather than hierarchical. Life politics is lifestyle politics in the serious and rich sense discussed in previous chapters. To give a formal definition: life politics concerns political issues which flow from processes of self-actualisation in post-traditional contexts, where globalising influences intrude deeply into the reflexive project of the self, and conversely where processes of self-realisation influence global strategies” (Giddens 1991, 214).

Giddens contends that the interface between the individual (person) and the global is now the primary locus for identity politics, a situation in which the nation-state is no longer a key player. In part this is so because individuals have been reflexively re-imagining their locales away from the nation (and so, living in and identifying with cities and neighborhoods instead of nations), and in part this is because the effects of modernization have eroded nation-state sovereignty and boundedness. Present-day concerns about the environment, human rights, disease, and gender equality do not admit to national boundaries, and global flows of ideas and cultural artifacts re-place national varieties in most locations.

However, while Giddens here refers to modernity in the singular, and seems to be comfortable with the idea that life politics has a currency and a positive valence at the global scale, I would argue that the emergence of a life-politics in any locale can be correlated to the presence of nation-state modernity at that locale. In those places under state-nation modernity conditions, the state remains the dominant cultural institution, and the nation its dominant idiom. And in those places, a “reflexive project of the self” as a group phenomenon would be liable to a critique that this is interfering with the state’s ability to plan for the lifestyle futures of the nation.

¹The advantage that these modern instrumentalities provide to the state is one of the principal reasons whyState-nation modernity is as durable as it seems to be.