Abstract
Time is both an ambiguous concept and a pervasive fact of collective and individual existence. Theorized, regulated, lived, time can be understood under the focus of a subjective or objective lenses. Nevertheless it is possible to identify modern patterns in the use of time that helped in the construction of a tacit and objective knowledge of how to conduct life as a member of society, family, and labor communities. In this article, we intend to discuss the thesis that contemporary public policy engages a new form of Foucault’s “biopolitics” in a context of desynchronization of lifecycle and questioning of those patterns. The current state regulation, objectified in public policies in general and social policies in particular, includes characteristics of behavioral standardization, but now not under the mediation of disciplinary structures, but under the focus on the individual, of an action from himself on himself.
Introduction
Time and temporality 1 seem to be two of the most relevant concepts for the understanding and critical discussion of contemporary public policy guidelines.
Indeed, presently new ways to be in time and ontime have emerged. The uncertainty, the predominance of the present time, the discontinuity in the structuring of individual and collective time, require the development of new analytical frameworks capable of dealing with the discontinuities and inconsistencies between experiences, norms, and sociopolitical expectations.
Considering this, we can identify in the present time the reference to subjectivity as a structuring axis of current European social policies. In fact, there are several programs, initiatives, and devices that put the emphasis on the role of the individual in the process of driving and building himself, in a personal and social journey marked by authenticity.
An example of this approach is materialized in the so-called active policies encouraged in the last years by the European Commission. The Summits in Lisbon and Nice, in 2000, were, in this context, important for the adoption of new strategies to combat growing unemployment and exclusion in Europe. The Nice Summit (December 2000), for example, defines the dynamic interaction between economic policy, social policy, and employment policy as the core of the new European Union (EU) social agenda for the new century. The emphasis of the European Union in entrepreneurship lies, for instance, in this strategic line. Thus, active policies are therefore a main focus within a framework of reform of the European social model, maintaining the bond between people, market, and society, betting not essentially on structural reforms, namely of the labor market, but rather in the adequacy of the skills of the subject to the new requirements and socioeconomic changes. Moreover, as stated by Silva (2004: 3), “activation measures are based on a relationship of ‘counterpart’ which in many cases is translated in a contract stating the recipient's duty to actively seek employment or follow a training program or other activities while there are no jobs available.” Besides this counterpart relationship (to a right corresponds a duty) is also present, in several documents of the EU, the concept of “return to employment integrated path,” which advocates the association between integration, coordination, and personalization (measures adapted to the beneficiary profile).
In articulation with this “personalized” intervention, the “subjectivation” process (Cantelli and Genard, 2007; Fassin, 2007; Martucelli, 2002), as we can call it, underlies the set of practices and regulatory guidelines focused on the work of self-production and self-appropriation of each individual and his personal, social, and professional experiences and narratives.
This process is articulated, among other factors, with the profound changes, in the past few years, in the role of the state in social welfare. In fact, especially since the 1990s, there are evidences, in several European countries, that the role of the public sector in the provision of welfare is being transformed, particularly in the sequence of the financial and economic crash of 2008 and the euro crisis. However the perspectives about how and how much the postwar welfare regimes changed are not consensual (Bonoli, 2005; Clayton and Pentusson, 1998; Ellison, 2006; Esping Anderson et al., 2002; Pierson, 2001, 2002). For most authors, changes are not radical, but incremental (Pierson, 2002). In other words, they are not oriented to dismantling but to restructuring social welfare regimes. Other authors however claim that the cutbacks are so radical in some countries that the main principles of the welfare regimes disappeared or are radically modified. Nevertheless, they all agree that changes cannot be reduced to a single major variable and that there are several and profound differences between countries. As Pierson (2002: 378) argues it is possible to discuss generally these changes considering three interconnected dimensions: recommodification, cost containment, and recalibration.
The process of decommodification occurs, accordingly to Esping-Anderson (1990: 21), “when a service is rendered as a matter of right and when a person can maintain a livelihood without reliance to the market.” This implies the presupposition that the construction of the welfare systems intended to detach the logic of social citizenship from the vulnerabilities of the labor market. An assumption that can be contested, because, in fact, in many aspects, the welfare systems were intrinsically connected with the capitalist regime interests and fluctuations. However considering the concept of decommodification as a base for debate, we can identify in present times a different movement that needs further research and discussion: the logic of recommodification (Pierson, 2002). According to this logic, the actual market configurations contribute to dismantle social protection and to pressure individuals to accept and adapt to job conditions that they do not have the capacity to negotiate. Without discussing whether this logic is evident or not in all the European countries, the main focus should be the reflection on its possible effects and about the conditions under which it is significant (Pierson, 2002), especially when combined with cost containment in social protection, low wages, and high tax levels.
Our reflection in this article is centered mainly on these possible effects as well as in the consequences of the recalibration of public policies influenced by the changes in family, in life course, in the nature of the labor market, in the age composition in actual societies, among other factors (Esping-Andersen, 1990; Pierson, 2002).
Recalibration, in the terms of Pierson (2002: 381), is in fact related with the reforms that intend to assure that contemporary welfare states are more consistent and effective in the response to the new goals and demands for social provision. Like this, two different types of recalibration emerge: a process of rationalization (modification of programs and services in order to achieve, in a more effective way, the intended goals) and a process of updating (adaptation of responses and services to the transformation of new and recognized social demands, norms, and expectations). It is not our goal in this article to characterize how these processes emerge and gain consistency in different European countries, but essentially to discuss possible effects associated with updating processes mainly arising from changes in life course and transformations in the labor market.
In fact, in modern European societies, social policies have been based on the idea that social integration is rooted primarily in employment. Therefore, the stimulus to employment, or compensation of their absence, with more or less moralizing contours, has been constituted as the basic grounds of inclusive and compensatory policies. The actual changes in the labor market have however put at the forefront of the debate the inadequacy or failure of traditional social policy devices. Thus, the so-called new generation of social policies in Europe 2 is founded on a double axiomatic. Firstly, the recognition of the individual not as an assisted person but as an active citizen, entitled to social utility and well-being. Secondly, the co-responsibility of the beneficiary citizen and of the society in the concretization of full societal and labor participation. Abstract devices become, under such guidelines, more concrete and adapted to the profile of individuals, as we have already noticed.
In this context, new semantic (empowerment, competence, contracting), professional (monitoring, activation, motivation, evaluation), and moral (trust, recognition, responsibility) universes become relevant. This new domains of sense are firmly rooted in processes of renewed political and social experimentation, in which the incitement to individual autonomy tends to be more central than the public protection rhetoric of the postwar welfare states. Thus, a new political technology of individuals is materialized. It aims primarily to ensure the presence of the individuals in the social and economic fields, especially when the modern structuring time (time of work, time of leisure) is altered. An example of this orientation is the evidences of unemployed active job seeking (regular presentation in employment centers, going to interviews, send spontaneously the curriculum vitae, among others) existent in many countries’ social protection and employment legislation.
Under this assumption, we aim to discuss, in this article, the thesis that contemporary public policy can engage, in some contexts, a new form of Foucault’s “biopolitics.” The current state regulation of social problems and social inclusion, based in personalized measures and incentives, seems in fact to include characteristics of “behavioral” standardization, but now, not under the mediation of disciplinary structures as stated by Foucault, but under the focus on the individual, of an action from himself on himself.
Between times of politics and biographic temporalities: Connections and disconnections in contemporary societies
Political action is characterized by the coexistence, often within greater tension, of different temporalities. Electoral cycles, as well as the public doxa and economic and media pressures, or also, the global agendas and temporalities determined by powerful sociopolitical contexts, as underlined by Hope (2009), tend to determine political options in terms of situational logics, as opposed to the need to design structural policies, essential for the resolution of complex and transverse problems and for the maturation of democratic regimes (Hope, 2009; Pierson, 2004). Several studies have actually emphasized the need to include the future in the present political action (Urry, 2002), through a prudential view and a perspective of substantial construction of the personal, social, and economic development. However, the cyclical time of politics leads frequently to the suspension of this assumption.
Thus, the short time is mostly privileged, contributing to the weakening of the social contract underlying the structuring of contemporary Western societies. The policy making based on emergency conditions needed consideration about the future impacts of decisions and the respective level of irreversibility. Several authors have questioned even the relevance of the democratic system, as it is currently structured, as the most suitable for the management of future societies, because of its conditioning in short temporalities (Araújo, 2012; Chesnaux, 1996; Hope, 2009; Rose and Scheuerman, 2009).
Subsequently social policies seem to be increasingly centered in the present time, revealing difficulty to consider the future as a time necessarily connected with the present, and thus, worthy of today’s attention (Adam and Groves, 2007).
On the other hand, the determination of integrated and structural policies perforce requires the overcoming of their current subdivision in sectorial areas. The sectorial social policies (employment, social support, family, education, health, etc.) are generally considered in an isolated and specialized way, and are evaluated statically (thus producing essentially “pictures” instead of “films”), not allowing the understanding of the differences between the different times (political, economic, and social) and experiential dimensions that they translate. The economic time focuses on logics of speed of production, profits in the short–medium term, continuous training, etc.; social time is family time and leisure. Failure to consider these differences particularly crossed and complex in contemporary societies, for instance in what concerns the conciliation between time family and time work (Cimpeanu, 2011; Crespi and Rossi, 2012; European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions [EFILWC], 2006; International Labour Organization and United Nations Development Programme, 2009), leads to a difficult concretization of expectations and to potentially disintegrating lives.
These two dimensions—prevalence of short time and (in)differentiation of the senses of collective and individual times—essential for the understanding of the politics’ times, are now even more extreme, producing widespread and profound impact on the lives of individuals and different social groups. It is increasingly raising a politics’ conception associated to an individualization of social experiences and problems. This occurs especially in contexts subject to a financial, economic, and social crisis, as the current one, allowing on the one hand to accentuate the centering of policies in overcoming or minimizing present crisis and, on the other hand, the weakening of social protection systems, demanding increasingly for an individual implication in the use of time and in the reconstruction of his lifecycle.
Synchronic connections between social and individual times in Fordist societies under the mediation of political action
The contributions of time sociology (Adam, 2004; Guillemard, 2003; Nanni, 2012; Riley et al., 1989), have enabled to support the idea that the emergence of industrial society, and wage labor resulting from it, contributed to the structuring of the life cycle in three temporalities, chronologically and qualitatively defined: education time, work time, and retirement time. The objective and institutionalized definition of these three temporalities which are significant, distinct, and sequential (thus, with a high potential for predictability), allowed the political construction of a set of rights, obligations, and resources, aggregated to a path of ages and roles with a both individual and collective dimension. Like this, under the aegis of the welfare state, it was set up a kind of “policy of the ages,” as Rémond and Percheron (1991) mentions, essential for the purposes of political intervention in the social and economic fields.
In fact, public action began to be structured, especially after the second half of the 20th century, in terms of hierarchical and well-defined temporalities: in a first “age,” the guarantee of equality in school attendance as well as policies supporting childhood, family, and education; in a second “age,” social protection aggregate to work and social contract, and in a third phase, the protection of the elderly under a precontractual assumption of trust uniting the state and the citizens (Guillemard, 2008; Pierson, 2004).
In addition, in modern Western societies, time was divided between working time, subject to regulatory schemes, and free time, as the remnant of the first. This spare time, traditionally limited to the private and family spheres, contributed to the creation of an individual and social identity, by reference to a labor framework that works as a guide for occidental social role construction (Nanni, 2012).
Thus, in this model, wage labor is like the structuring core of time and experiential cycles of individuals’ roles in society with obvious implications in the organization of private life. Similarly, the architecture of public action acquires meaning and normative and institutional legitimacy, upstream and downstream of the work and nonwork cycles. As stated by Mayer and Schoepflin (1989, p. 198), In the welfare state the continuous flow of life is transformed into a series of situations all of which have a clear formal definition: periodization of life and proliferation of sharp transitions which derive from the social insurance system combine into a lifelong biographical pattern.
In fact, the model of the Welfare State in the postwar period, through formal rules, rights, and obligations associated with a chronological (and biological) time, contributed to the standardization of “normal” life events (the stage and nature of transitions from one stage to another; the social and expected content of each life stage; references and standards that define each age limit, etc.) and consequently for the temporality of biographies. This way, it was established a model of life cycle synchronism, anchored in a clear and relatively static definition of age and roles thresholds, rights, and obligations associated with them, which helped to establish a certain consent, a kind of “metanarrative” (Shanahan and Longest, 2009) on the elements inherent to a “normal” life cycle (Guerreiro et al., 2007; Schoon and Silbereisen, 2009): the start of schooling; the completion of education, employment, and economic independence; the starting of own family and leaving parents’ home; the accomplishment of a stable professional project; and the retirement in the final phase of the cycle.
Thus, the concept of life cycle aims the temporization of biographies by identifying the stages of an individual path and by regulating the respective time horizon, under the framework of collective temporalities (Adam, 2004; Adam and Groves, 2007; Nanni, 2012). These are nothing more than broad categories that coordinate, articulate, and set out the activities of greatest importance for social life and for the preservation of the respective cohesion (Sue, 1995).
The standardized definition of the life cycle, resulting from such a political perspective of age management, which positions the State as the master of chronological time, the “keeper of the clocks” in the words of Delmas (1991), raises two types of questions. On the one hand, it creates conditions for a normalizing discourse, allowing the identification and classification (with various nuances of moral standards) of all life paths not framed in the standards, on the other hand, it creates the possibility of structuring an action plan in the long time, in a future perspective that enables a new perception of the present and of the constraints or possibilities of the past (Guillemard, 2003, 2008; Kohli, 1987).
The multiplicity of times and the “destandardization” of the life cycles in contemporary societies
The model of time structuring associated with the Fordist wage society—linear, segmented, and measurable—has, however, been falling apart currently and with it the synchronous notion of the lifecycle.
In fact, the relative sequential ordering of life stages and choices, which tended to characterize the so-called virtuous cycle of socialization and integration (of the majority) of modern Western families (study, work, stability, autonomy), especially until the two last decades of the 20th century, is today completely anachronistic. The labor time ceases to be the marker of most social temporalities and life cycle loses its continuous character, with predictable stages, and as such relatively controlled a priori, to become increasingly flexible, random, and fragmented. The active life is no longer structured in two distinct phases—work and retirement—but in random and interlocked periods of activity and inactivity over the life course.
Similarly, the public action in the field of social protection, traditionally associated to the assumptions of the Fordist wage society, loses the fundamental basis of axiological and operational legitimacy. Policies of universalist penchant, tend to give rise to targeted policies and measures, which are sometimes of palliative or activation nature. The management of the present overrides the reference and anticipation of the future. Intermediate social programs, many of which ad hoc, are more concerned primarily with managing precariousness than in creating conditions for overcoming it; learning time is transmuted into lifelong education, and new devices (internships, training, and professional requalification; incentives for self-employment, etc.) are set up with the implicit goal of maintaining existences in the social–economic field, as well as to neutralize the risks of “social death,” by minimizing the gaps, increasingly more frequent, prolonged, and heterogeneous, between individual and social temporalities.
The fragmentation of work as a fundamental mechanism of social and experiential structuring, thus determines, in parallel, the dissolution of the ternary organization of social time, in favor of a new crossing of times. A “polichrony” that is consequently accompanied by a “desynchronization” of the biographic narrative, as outlined by Bessin (1994).
Indeed, in this context, due to job insecurity and labor flexibility, the biographic trajectories become “self-reflective” (Beck, 2001), “the growth of an aspiration to individual sovereignty over time, leading to biographic trajectories increasingly negotiated, and therefore more diversified” (Guillemard, 2008: 84).
The actual randomness and contingency of life paths, due mainly to unstructured sequences between employment and unemployment along the career path, and new forms of work organization, namely flexible work, intermittent work, and the use of new information and communication technologies (allowing, e.g., working from home), determine the structuring ways of individual temporalities and produce a kind of “social arrhythmia,” using Castells’ (1998) expression. Heterogeneous temporalities marked by precariousness and setbacks in which the before and the after no longer form a linear sequence. In fact, there is a constant pendulum movement between periods of training, work, and inactivity, redistributed unpredictably and in a differentiated way along the life cycle of each individual, affecting all socioprofessional groups.
A fact that ultimately establishes itself as the foundation of a double crisis (Guillemard, 2008; Heinz, 2001)—of normativity and future. A crisis of normativity to the extent that regulatory systems are actually dissociated from reality, continuing to rely on uniform and universal categories such as age, in a moment of destandardization of life itineraries. A crisis of future associated with individuals dealing with trajectory uncertainties, with the inability to overcome the pressure of the present time and as such of properly defining the settings for a future time.
The current asynchronicity of the life cycle and the emergence of new social risk profiles represent, thus, significant challenges for social policies. The paradoxical normative inadequacy, which currently occurs between socio occupational reality with deep structural causes of collapse and social protection measures increasingly individualized and palliative, derives mostly from the rigidity of the welfare machine. State regulation reveals in fact numerous difficulties in understanding and adapting to new social data and to a new conception of risk. Actually new tools for securing are required, or the “re-institutionalization” of the life cycle, as stated by Leisering (2003), associated with more flexible experiential pathways, with the quick inadequacy of knowledge and skills and with the filling in of long periods of inactivity, which now reach all ages and not only those who abandon the active life with retirement.
Thus, it is ensured an “optimal management of uncertainty” (Ewald, 1992), inventing a new security associated with the individual in “mobility” (maintaining his employability) and not only to employment. As such, it is the “architecture” of social protection that starts to be in question. The new means to trigger, according to Esping-Andersen (2002), are necessarily connected with human capital development and with ensuring education and training throughout life, assuming the reversibility and precariousness of transitions as a substantive and enduring element today. The new policies, called “life course policies,” would not be structured by age, but would aim to generate and maintain the capabilities of individuals (skills, knowledge, employability, health) over various ages and establish security in the multiple (and many times unpredictable) transitions that henceforth pervade the life cycles (Esping-Andersen, 2002).
What we might call, following Ellwood’s (1998) perspective, of a “policies dynamic construction,” thus implies the combination of parts into a whole, without forgetting the specificities of each group and the inequalities that differently determine the paths of life, as well as the use of flexible and dynamic monitoring means of the assumptions and policy outcomes. This implies, in particular, the regular collection of multiple and crossed indicators of well-being, anchored in time and space, so that the needs, problems, and opportunities of individuals and groups can be specifically classified, assessed, and monitored.
However, it must be considered, in addition and as underlined by Araújo (2012: 9), that the perceptions and uses of time are not only products of daily action (often also symbolic) of institutions and individuals that personify them, but also of deeper structures establishing worldviews about what certain groups, individuals or societies deserve or not. It is, in this regard, that the “time cultural patterns”—that distribute the legitimate ways to use time—act as devices to justify various forms of domination and power, which determine the definition of social expectations and aspirations by limiting, constraining or amplifying and expanding them.
Fractal times and (re)emergence of “biopolitics”
As we have been pointing out, from the imposition of exogenous temporalities that end up changing the meaning of life and were masterfully caricatured by Chaplin in Modern Times (1936), there has been in contemporary societies, a reorganization and intensity of temporalities that particularly mobilize the subjectivity of social individuals.
In this regard, Vrancken (2008), exploring the Foucauldian concept of “biopolitics,” classifies the action of the contemporary State as a kind of biographic action, anchored in the work of individuals about themselves and in the respective biographic narratives. The purpose would be the classification and interference in the life courses, implying the individuals in the respective biographic recomposition.
The challenge now is to ensure the more uncertain trajectories and life course, unsettled by the turmoil of the labor market and the private life. In this context, the purpose of working on oneself would be to help people recover from the testing of themselves and from formulating the narrative of their misfortune (Vrancken, 2008: 46).
In the 70s of the 20th century, Michel Foucault develops the concept of biopolitics to designate how power shifts in the 18th and 19th centuries, regarding the “discipline” of individuals and population. In other words, “to designate what makes life and its mechanisms enter the field of explicit calculations and turns power-knowledge into an agent of transformation of human life” (Foucault, 1976: 188). Thus, the man and his behavior, associated to the concepts and principles of “normal” and “pathological,” constitute the object of political action and new socioeconomic strategies, giving rise to a normalizing “biopower” achieved, for example, in the management of public health, hygiene, nutrition, sexuality, and birth. This type of power models and orders the forces of life, controls and medicates the population, under the argument of favoring growth and well-being. As stated by Foucault (1976: 183), the first pole of life management was centered on the body as a machine: its training, the increase of its skills, the extortion of its forces, the parallel growth of its usefulness and docility, its integration into efficient and economic control systems, all this was ensured by processes of power that characterized the disciplines: anatomo-politics of the human body. The second, that was formed somewhat later, in the mid-eighteenth century, focused on body-type, body traversed by the mechanics of living, which supports the biological processes: proliferation, births and mortality, the health level, life duration, longevity, with all the conditions that can make it vary; its appropriation operates throughout a series of interventions and regulatory controls: a biopolitics of the population.
The notion of biopolitics seems, from this perception, a relevant concept, as several authors point out (Agamben, 1995, 1998; Cocco and Negri, 2005; Messu, 2008; Negri and Hart, 2002), for the understanding of some contemporary European politics. The human lives, taken as political categories, become increasingly exposed and administered. 3 In this case, we can consider particularly the measures concerning dependent populations, integration, and activation programs, unemployment management, among others.
Indeed, the current state regulation in several European countries, more personalized than normative, includes characteristics of behavioral standardization, but now, under the mediation of the individual, of an action from himself on himself (Messu, 2008). Therefore, in a new perspective, it means taking action on the temporalities that individuals are part of; these temporalities are to be changed so that they can correspond, in the most coherent way, to the social temporalities. The multiplication of these temporalities and the emergence of subjectivity policies, seem thus to be issues that are inextricably linked.
Insertion or activation policies linked to employment derive from this logic of public action, seeking to insert the individual temporalities in collective, standardized, and institutionalized time frames. A “desocialized” individual, due to a long period of unemployment, for example, who manages his own time, is prompted by public action to undergo a series of tests, which essentially focus on the regulation of gaps between individual and collective time, integrating him in social, valued, recognized, and institutionally legitimized times: periodic presentations in services; training or internships; mandatory community service, etc.
In this regard, public action seems to be increasingly meddling in the management of biographical and even biological existence of individuals (Cantelli and Genard, 2007; Fassin and Memmi, 2004). The incitement to narrative aims to put into words the experiences of precariousness and rebuild times of fragmented pathways.
A “presentist” use of the past that tries to compress lived experiences and make them visible in the present moment (Hortog, 2003). The reference to the future temporality becomes increasingly blurred and hardly operationally feasible. We are now temporarily “homeless” of the promethean vision. We witness either a contraction of the present, either a dilution or fragmentation of the future in various “present times,” marking the end of modern narratives of progress.
The construction of the self and the individual trajectories as forms of “colonization of the present” in contemporary policies
In fact, the “glass societies” (Corcuff, 2002) in which we live are deeply vulnerable. The risk of subjecting people to an ongoing process of inclusion and noninclusion, to a sum of present times without any future perspective, thus, agreeing with the construction of boundary statutes, is not negligible. This way, it can be applied the paradoxical situation of being both “inside” and “outside” the social sphere, in a logic of mere postponement of social death.
The constitutive paradox of the current social suffering lies effectively in the social and political appeal to the construction by the individuals of an experiential map, without being known the respective structuring coordinates; without a clear identification of the starting and finishing lines and without relevant “compasses” to assist in the construction of the path. The example of the articulation between the process of formal socialization and the entry into the labor market is, at this level, particularly paradigmatic. Obtaining an academic degree is no longer, by itself, a means of access to a particular job and socioeconomic status. In addition, the choice of a particular training and job is often driven by variables (such as levels of demand in the labor market, wage rates, etc.) that quickly become anachronistic, making the prospective planning of the various stages of the life cycle more difficult.
In this context, the demand for evidence of social, economic, and civic integrity, on the basis of an evaluation process of behaviors (assessed as products of will and motivation for the societal and labor reframing), contains individuals, who are disintegrated or in a precarious situation, in a perverse logic. On the one hand, they must respond to the need to prove their uninterrupted willingness to participate socioeconomically, and on the other hand, they are submitted to the simultaneous judgment of their (in)ability to ensure it consistently and in a perennial way. The experiences, the “destiny,” are thus designed as a puzzle, permanently built in zigzag, that is to say, without a clear identification of the whole design or of the coherent line to follow (Araújo, 2005).
As stated by Rancière (1995), the visibility of behaviors involves, henceforth, the “clarification of the self,” the self-certification of what one is, what one does, the capabilities one has, in short, a witness of truth toward oneself. The visibility of existences and behavior, which was then ensured by effective standards and “disciplines” (Foucault, 1976), allowing to objectify, quantify, and compare nosographically the behaviors of individuals, remains, and is in the present time amplified, however, it is differently materialized. Each individual is prompted not only to restore its interiority, learning to revalue and use skills and experience in the rebuilding of their place in the societal whole, but also to make publicly visible this reconstruction work, as justification for the continued participation as a member of society. Fassin (2007) expresses the hypothesis that “the self exposure” will become a common process to raise the attention of public powers in a kind of compassion policy, of “suffering as a language.”
The “publicness” of public and private life of individuals becomes, therefore, a key element of a new political and social paradigm. From the unification, based on explicit and shared rules, we move on primarily to the enhancement of the sense of self and the ethical content of life; from the stability of an occupational function to the unique construction of existences; from a determined individuality to a constructed individuality. From this perspective, evaluations of life situations and career paths are multiplied, capturing, and valuing the subjective investment and mediating the construction of links between the individual and society. The curriculum vitae is, in this context, the navigation permit between private life and the needed public involvement.
Thus, it is clear the transition, in several European countries, from a “state that protects” to a “state that empowers, which makes it able,” which triggers mechanisms for a work on the self: to work on employability in order to avoid unemployment, developing the capacity for initiative and adaptability building. For example, a second career as a “plan B” and/or to be able to fill in inactivity time, even during retirement. In other words, we move progressively from a solidarist model of social risk to a responsibility model, based on a set of social proofs to which individuals have to abide by; from a conception of “credit-rights” we move to a conception of “autonomy-rights,” that is to say, from a logic based on the idea of “having the possibility of,” we switch to a logic rooted in the idea of “being able” and “to demonstrate being able of” (Genard, 2007). Responsibility can thus easily transmute into “responsabilisation.” The construction of the social link based on a personalizing and often compassionate perspective, may in fact be perverse if with it there is the risk of meritocratic assessment of the existence of some individuals (social “surplus numbers”) regarding the retraction of sociolabor opportunities.
Therefore, the contemporary individual is the one who is prompted to construct his existence under the possibility of risk, managing in the best way the available information and assuming the consequences of his actions or omissions. At this level, the employment dimension is particularly elucidating. Considering the high rates of unemployment in Europe, 4 the so-called employment occupational programs, trainings, and internships, materialize, in several countries, an updating perspective in the reform of social welfare regimes. On the one hand, these devices allow to preserve the possibility of social and economic participation, structuring different temporalities (work schedule, leisure time); on the other, they follow mostly a perspective not of integration but mere activity, which is followed by, in most cases, a new moment of noninclusion in the labor market and, consequently, in the public space.
Final considerations
The focus of the policies in the present temporality might dissolve the evaluation of the results, establishing a sort of “standing temporary” with multidimensional implications in the structuring of individual and collective lives. Indeed, critical thinking and the overcoming of approaches excessively and/or exclusively focused on present temporality and on individualized readings of contemporary social problems, seem essential for the foundation of a political and social intervention that is not a mere reconfirmation of the impossibility of thinking and acting beyond a limited temporal and spatial frame of complicity with the present time, and thus, potentially invalidating.
Learning to live with uncertainty and precariousness of expectations and pathways is today, as we pointed out, a cultural, social, and political reference of great relevance. In this context, the individuals are asked to reread and rebuild their paths and project them in time, this is the core of activation policies—the obligation of the individual to give his own rhythm to his life path by setting steps and standards and submitting to public tests of plausibility.
A new dimension of “biopolitics” is now established, from the “body machine” and the “body species” (Foucault, 1976), we move on to what could be described as the “body-reflection,” a look by himself at himself, under the mediation of a sociopolitical magnifying glass able to reveal the minor faults in the process of rebuilding himself and his integration possibilities. It is the uniqueness of each person, and therefore his handicaps and potentialities, which becomes the basis of sociopolitical intervention. Public action is, thus, subject to hardly compatible temporalities, producing profound ambiguities in contemporary social policy: between urgency and short time, on the one hand, and continuity (e.g., objectified in processes of social monitoring and management of nonemployment) and long time (for lack or insufficiency of adequate answers and resources to current problems), on the other hand.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The translation of this article was funded by the Portuguese Government through the FCT – Foundation for Science and Technology under the project PEST PEst-OE/SADG/UI4067/2013.