Managing You

July 17th, 2008

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Posted by ChrisG at 4:14 pm

Following up the previous post, it’s interesting – having read this flaccid attempt at an interview with Cameron – how far the “progressive agenda” over which the former PR-man and the shambling remnants of the Nulabour project are emptily squabbling is identical, ideologically speaking, to that of BBC3 reality/lifestyle programming, backed up with some behavioural economics, top-heavy cost-benefit analyses, and a few vaporous shreds of “morality” (i.e. the constant urge to “take responsibility” serving as the end-point of all ethical reflection).

Take, as an example, last night’s Make My Body Younger. The whole premise of this programme (like every other one in this genre) is to focus in on some poor, wretched sod and conduct what is effectively an extended actuarial risk analysis of their benighted life. What’s particularly interesting about this is how the imperative to ‘take responsibility’ is articulated: the individual is imagined as a vessel, more or less isolated from the rest of society, bearing within him or her bundles of risk (too much drinking, too much smoking, emotional dysfunctions), all of which they have to learn to ‘manage’ – by cutting down, following a tailored exercise programme, facing up to unresolved childhood ‘events’ which are helpfully postulated into existence by the programme’s expert analysts.

This is where the “morality” stops: with a set of behavioural heuristics that can be burnt into the individual with the aid of fear and shame, designed to “empower” them to manage the risk that they constitute. The programme operates by imposing upon its subject a particular concept of the individual: it excises them from all the social relationships in which they’re embedded, and reconstructs them as an accounting mechanism. It was interesting, watching last night’s edition, how no mention was made of how Stewart (the subject) earnt a living: hunched over a computer in the cramped living room of his half-size toytown Barratt house, arranging “hospitality events” via email and phone, smoking fag after fag to deal with the stress of having to negotiate incessantly with arseholes. Managing risk is something you can only do once the risks have been defined for you – and it seems the social relations of production are outside the frame. Just get back on the horse, and be a good little functional economic unit.

But whether the topic it’s knife crime, obesity or just drinking too much, the key notes being struck by the makers of the makers of programmes like this and by agenda-setting politicians are in harmony. Being responsible is accepting that you are a seething nest of hazards that need to be controlled from within and without. Given that this is the outer limit of all current mainstream discourse about the ends of politics, to imagine that Cameron’s USP is a “return to morality” is about as valid as thinking that the next Labour manifesto will feature a return to socialism.