Being political now - Page 3
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 13: The Next Big Thing
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Mark Bahnisch
WHAT, THEN, OF THE CHARGE – MADE BY AMERICAN SOCIOLOGIST Robert Putnam among others – that the issues around which participation and protest are organised are more "private" or "personal" than the "public" issues which allegedly excited Baby Boomers? Again, there are multiple confusions. Sixties activism (or '80s activism, for that matter) was not partisan in the sense of being centred around support for a particular political party. The age of mass politics in the West died decades earlier – as politics began to concern itself more with "the administration of things" than with class struggle or competing social visions of capitalism or communism. Feminism, gay liberation, environmentalism and other post-materialist movements of the '60s and early '70s were attempts to open up the political and politicise the personal. Mainstream politics responded inadequately, preferring to reduce political questions to economics, and to displace lifestyle politics into symbolic culture wars.
There is no doubt that one phenomenon which affects those who grew up in the '80s and '90s is the post-traditional nature of identity. As sociologists such as Anthony Giddens argue, the defining nature of our world is choice, and this applies to identities as much as commodities. If you are born a Baptist, you can choose to become a Buddhist. If your parents are conservative Christians, you can still be bisexual. Negotiating identity choices remains difficult, but there is a link between a society where consumption and choice are lionised and lauded, and a politics of personal identity.
My research and anecdotal evidence from teaching at Griffith University bolsters the argument that Gen Y students are adept at making links between the local and the global. And they want to see change in the world. This is not easily reduced to a partisan affiliation, and is not easily captured in a poster to be hung on a museum wall in thirty years' time.
Much political activism now takes place on the internet. The oft-decried individualism and consumption-orientated stereotypes of Gen Y are reflected politically through the use of new media. If social change is now reduced to shifts in social identity rather than joining a closed political process and putting the firewall up, then the negotiation of values through LiveJournal, MySpace and blogs is a new politics of the personal. This is played out across a much broader scope and in a much more collective way than the politics of an ALP branch meeting in a school hall on a cold night.
Phenomena such as Moveon.org, Getup.org.au, Indy-Media and blogs are increasingly mobilising political involvement. Importantly, such media provide an opportunity for youth themselves to talk back to power, and to challenge many of the tired myths which sustain the closed and selfreferential world of politics and its media acolytes.
New attitudes to the global, new forms of sexual identity, and even identifications organised around fashion or music are different to the protest songs that united past generations, but if people think that a new politics of the social is not being articulated in these spaces, then they simply don't know where to look. As sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argues, many of us are "shopping for a self". But what he may have overlooked is that we're doing this in a wired, interactive and increasingly global way. And that, too, will change the world.
If you require a monument to the symbolism of the '60s, go to the Museum of Brisbane and have a look around. But if you think that the impulses the '60s created towards the politicisation of the personal and participation in reframing life choices are dead, log on to the internet.
Much of the thrust of the culture wars and the narrowing of politics to its bare instrumental bones – which has stepped in tandem with the professionalisation of politics over the last few decades – has been an attempt to put these impulses back into easily labelled and stored boxes. Much of the generationalist discourse is about designing those boxes, complete with "up-to-date" bells and whistles, and selling them. But politics is a way of creating genuinely new things in the world. That has not stopped – and it won't stop. It is just finding new modes of expression and engagement. The challenge for the media, and for politicians, is to catch up and wake up to a social and political revolution that is well underway in cyberspace, if not yet on the streets. ♦