What images do we have in our minds when we envision societal change? What kind of states do we fantasize about when we adjust routines in order to improve ourselves and advance our circumstances of life? Whatever the state of the arts envisioned, these images of future change are not irrelevant. They are important driving forces and motives for human existence — they are fuel for action and accomplishments by individuals and collectives.
Knowledge effectively nurtures mental pictures of change, promising new horizons of life improvement and management of problems. Scientific proof has become a natural part of our daily whereabouts. We become enlightened and convinced of relationships between actions and their results, according to which we can guide our lives and societies. We routinely incorporate knowledge in action that we think can impact our individual personal life quality and health. Simple everyday action of eating salad and brushing our teeth are evidence-based action that people have incorporated as a natural element in everyday routines.
Due to the known relationship between smoking and a whole range of diseases most smokers are convinced that if they were to stop smoking their life would improve considerably. Such a fantasy of change can also concern groups, collectives, or humanity as a whole. The political aim of a “smoke free society” is a rather natural idea nowadays, it has become a realistic and normalized policy discourse. The justification of it is found in the scientific evidence of the harm cause by the behavior. Governance and political strategies embed certain epistemologies and views on relationships.
Lifestyle politics
Industrialization, urbanization, and the new work division of the 18th and 19th centuries made it increasingly difficult to predict and control individual behavior. Societal institutions took a new role of producing and controlling moral codes. Michel Foucault’s pioneering work has shown how courts and other control instances came to function as machineries of moral negotiations and factories of images for individual and societal change. Deviating individuals were defined and diagnosed, and plans were devised of their ‘improvement’ and treatment. Relevant, reliable, and “true” evidence gained an important role for assuring accountability and soundness of decision-making.
Political ideas of prohibiting and sanctioning action that is bad and harmful and simultaneously encouraging the good and the healthy are corner stones in all current societies. The kind of knowledge and experience that the collective rules and reason are based upon and implemented vary a great deal between societies, but the basic idea in public health and lifestyle policies is that collectives’ behaviors can be adjusted and governed towards better realities.
To conceptualize governance of lifestyles in contemporary times, the 1990s modernity theories tried to capture the ideas of body and Self as fields of negotiation, as identity projects that would steer and underpin governance, and in the long run, societies. People in individualist societies were claimed to be more inward-oriented and act in line with internalized knowledge, beliefs, and emotions. The concept of life politics was coined in 1991 by Anthony Giddens to describe political issues flowing from processes of self-actualization in post-traditional contexts. Giddens juxtaposed these flows to the solid and interest-based emancipatory politics of the past, which had strived to eliminate exploitation, inequality, and oppression.
The great ambivalence
At the same time as messages from science in their content, mode and discourse entail assurance, stability, and safety, these messages will also entail risks of not being valid and sound. Disturbing elements such as overlooking and ignoring diversity, and a certain level of suppression of contradictions has been circumstances incorporated in peoples’ consciousness. This is due to developments increasing level of education, secularization, and greater access to different kinds of knowledge and information, both science and media literacy have increased. Access to mass information and possibilities to share cultural content in large audiences have made citizens in all western societies more critically aware of relativism, validity, and reliability issues involved in knowledge production, and of the ways in which scientific results can be simplified when translated into popular narratives.
The development of more reliance on science and more skepticism toward the same can be seen as a great contemporary ambivalence. In some ways it is natural: as the things that one is most dependent on, will be the things one will mostly scrutinize and critically think about. The most topical truth of the day is the one that spurs most political debate regarding its signification. What does science really say? What kind of knowledge can one rely on? What sort of knowledge is relevant? Neutral? Reliable?
Obesity is a good example of a field with a lot of diverse messages from different fields of knowledge production. Recently, American journalist Gary Taubes has argued that the over 600,000 articles written about obesity is “the noise” generated by a dysfunctional research establishment that has failed to produce unambiguous knowledge, and by this opened the door to a lot of opinions. I think Taubes is on to something that the research community is very aware of, but lack the tools for dealing with: tensions between different fields of expertise are causing confusion rather than the great clarity that one would expect considering the amount of new and specialized knowledge.
A new strain of cyber activism is drawing new kinds of connections between knowledge and beliefs, self-governance, civic activation, and the ways in which these are connected in politics in the field of lifestyles and addiction. Research shows that today people tend to engage with multiple causes whose relevance is filtered in relation to personal lifestyles, and that lifestyle and health have become key thematic fields for citizens’ political engagement.
The primary contrast to be highlighted today may no longer be Giddens’ discrepancy between identity-shaping self-reflexive modes of governance versus earlier solidarity ethics of justice and equality. Specialized knowledge and engaging stories of change spread quickly in such areas as sexuality, environmental issues, and nutrition, and they tend to engage both in emancipatory and life political sense. Instead, an important task for the social sciences has become to understand how politics of self and body are entangled with knowledge production and media practices.
