Buddhism is nonsense

Rose’s claim for a mutation in the relations of power is also substantiated by another path on which he shifts from second-order observations to observations of the first order. To be sure, he generally operates at the second-order level insofar as he observes how objects of government are made thinkable and actionable by means of governmental rationalities and technologies (Rose 1999, 35). Yet when he drifts to a more positive characterization of “our plural present” (195), Rose replicates some key claims offered by the stories of contemporary cultural theorists and sociologists about cultural differentiation, subpolitics, and aestheticized consumerism. While his approach does not rule out a critical perspective on postsocial, advanced liberal forms of governing, Rose nevertheless emphasizes their positive potentials with respect to social experimentation and alternative forms of political agency: “Within these spaces [of communities], it is possible for subjects to distance themselves from the cohesive discourse and strategies of the social state—schooling, public service broadcasting, municipal architecture, and the like. They can now access a whole range of resources and techniques of subject formation in order to invent themselves, individually and collectively, as new kinds of political actors” (179). This is the precise point in the argument at which Rose does not remain merely diagnostic but explicitly affirms a particular kind of self-inventing subject. The shift from detached second-order observation to affirmative first-order description is complemented by Rose’s invention of what he terms “ethico-politics” (188) to designate the emergent field of contestation and experimental self-creation opened up after the withering of the social perspective and the critique of the welfare state. What is at stake in the view that society as a knowable totality gives way to a form of a sociality constituted by multiple forms of expertise, networks, or communities? What are the costs for political analysis of privileging politics as the “active art of living” that opposes all obstacles to the vital self-assertion of the will to live through active self-creation? (Rose 1999, 283). First, there are of course political costs of what is conceived as no longer possible. They center on the difficulties, to say the least, of referring to the kind of knowledge of society or social structure that has been essential for public policy and provision as remedies against social inequality and its ills and as a condition of exercising civil, political, and social rights. There is a dual displacement occurring: of forms of social knowledge and of questions of the role of the state in resource allocation and the securing of minimum and universal standards. The emphasis on the identifications that form communities, or on aestheticized forms of “ self-creation through somatic individuality” and an “ethic of vitalism” (Rose 1999, 283; 2001, 18) appears to sideline, if not to rule out, the salience of this kind of knowledge and these political questions. In this respect the “birth of community” seems to manifest the long-noted affinities between postmodern discourses on cultural diversity and societal differentiation, on the one hand, and neoliberal strategies for dismantling and transforming welfare services and ossifying and exploiting differences (Taylor-Gooby 1994). Arguments for granting more space to the diversity of civil society, for instance in the shape of “ethico-political movements,” run the risk of ossifying differences of a social nature. While Rose would no doubt insist that differences are in part governmental artifacts and identity the result of active identifications, this still leaves open the wider political ramifications of the enthusiasm for a politics of plural communities beyond the state. There are also analytical costs, as pointed out by urban sociologists and geographers (Brenner, Peck, and Theodore 2010). It is simply very difficult to move from the local, the unique, the contingent, and the relatively unstructured to extralocal contexts, systems, and fundamental question of what kind of active, sovereign state power needs to be exercised for the potentially lethal conflicts of civil society to be kept in check and for individuals to gain the capacities to participate and engage in social and political life. We are left with only a fluid and experimental form of postsocial politics. In Rose’s more recent writings the bracketing of the state is sustained, although the concept of ethicopolitics seems to have receded. In their introduction to the collection Governing the Present, Rose and Miller (2008) make clear their initial ambitions with these studies. The republication of these works, they explain, aims “to counter some of the abstract forms that some of these ideas have taken, and to demonstrate how our conceptual tools were forged in the analysis of some very specific problem fields” (21). Hence, the emphasis on localized and empirical analysis is repeated and thereby underlined. Rose and Miller also state their ambition to avoid economic reductionism and all-embracing, epochal descriptions, and their desire to develop a non—state centered perspective on power. In the place of structural analysis (derived from Louis Althusser) and its tendency to reduce social relations and subjectivities to their function in reproducing economic relations, they claim that they wished to open up more sophisticated ways of addressing “the multiplicity and variability of modes of subject formation” (4) and the specificity and irreducibility of programs of governance operating within various domains. One way of doing this is by concentrating on “minor figures” and their specific activities since it is “only through their activities that states, as they were termed by those who seemed untroubled by the meaning of this term, could govern at all” (Rose and Miller 2008, 5). Rather than the state apparatus as point of origin, the focus should be on “a power without a center, or rather with multiple centers” (9). While such an approach could be read as a fruitful way of supplementing or extending the analysis of state politics and policy, it becomes a substitute for it or alternative to it. Under the aegis of this approach studies of governmentality mistake the analysis of regimes of governing—with their rationalities, technologies, modes of subjectification, and different aspirations and ends—for a study of the state itself. Vital Politics and the Art of Living Rose’s subsequent work (2001; 2007) becomes more focused on life and the neurosciences. He first shifts from govemmentality to biopolitics in its several contemporary manifestations, instanced by genetics and genomics, risk screening and pharmacology, and all the way to aesthetic interventions on the body. There he finds that the days of state-administered biopolitics, exemplified by the eugenic drive for biological and moral perfection, are over, succeeded by alliances between, for instance, self-creating consumers and pharmaceutical companies, and a biomedicine that offers products for voluntary bodily improvements and services for risk minimization. Rose is at pains to avoid a purely negative view of this novel “somatic individuality” and its ethics and recognizes the expanded possibilities for autonomy and self-formation offered by biotechnology that “enables us to intervene upon ourselves in new ways” (Rose 2007, 8). The passage from “the social state” to “advanced liberalism” thus holds the promise of more diversified experimentation and contestation of truth claims about biological normality: “Our somatic individuality has become opened up to choice, prudence and responsibility, to experimentation, to contestation—and so to a ‘vital politics’” (Rose 2001, 20). The phrase “art of living” is here given a more substantive anchorage in the very materiality of the body, and the concept of ethicopolitics has been transmuted into “ethopolitics”: “By ethopolitics I mean to characterize ways in which the ethos of human existence . . . have come to provide the ‘medium’ within which the self-government of the autonomous individual can be connected up with the imperatives of good government. . . . While ethopolitical concerns range from those of lifestyle to those of community, they coalesce around a kind of vitalism. . . . In this highly contested domain, somatic individuals are the key actors” (Rose 2001, 18). None of this escapes the earlier dilemmas we have raised. If we follow Rose and regard a politics of “life itself” as a fundamental form of contemporary agency and contestation, then it is difficult to understand how active choices of self-creation can be available without raising the question of the role of the state in ensuring access to a health-care system that includes the innovations of biomedicine, surgery, and the pharmaceutical industries and in ensuring a set of universal standards so that life can be lived in this self-governing way. Otherwise, ethopolitics becomes the preserve of a privileged caste (on either national or global scales) or, at best, highly unevenly distributed. If we admit this, then the conventional character of politics has not been displaced by the discovery of the ever new forms of biopolitics but will be played out in those old appropriation and allocation struggles, which have been at the core of the territorial state’s quest for civil peace and the welfare state’s establishment of social rights. Without the conventional domain of social politics, typically framed in terms of questions of access and equality, ethopolitics is confined to its vitalist, consumerist, technological, and lifestyle elements. It simply amplifies a kind of narcissistic lifestyle concern with the self’s corporeal perfectibility and vital capacities. It is at these intersections that Rose sees the emergence of a new kind of ethical subjectivity in terms of active self-creation in relation to the plasticity of life and corporeality. At such moments the Foucauldian project reminds us of nothing as much as mainstream sociological assertions of “life as a planning project” and of the self-creation of identity in late modern life-politics advanced some years ago by theorists such as Ulrich Beck (1992) and Anthony Giddens (1991; Beck-Gernsheim 1996)—with the added stratum of a plastic biological materiality. Paradoxically, the demise of the social state leaves us not with the positive conception of power advanced by Foucault but with resistance to a highly negative or repressive power, as “all that which blocks or subverts the capacity of others asserting for themselves their own vitalism” (Rose 1999, 283).