Youth and the New Adulthood by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789811533655
Publisher: Springer Singapore

A New Concept of Autonomy and Agency?

This preference for small, everyday forms of resilience must also be related, in our opinion, to the wider transformation of the idea of agency and autonomy in the new context of contemporary uncertainty, a context that underpins the shifting nature of adulthood itself. According to some social analysts (see for example, Gergen 2001; Sloterdijk 1996), the choice to relinquish the idea of rigid control over one’s social surroundings (and over one’s personal inner space) can be, in some cases, a sensible decision in order to save personal autonomy. Indeed, if the outer and inner context is characterized by swift and uncertain transformation processes, ‘choosing not to choose’ can become a fitting modality to get to some form of control over personal time. For instance, giving up the need for authenticity—as in the desire to set once and for all what we truly want and what is our potential—can become the path to the ‘good life’ (Rosa 2010). A life tuned into the wavelength of a temporality that emphasizes volatility, flexibility of values, the importance of ductile evaluations that are context-sensitive. One can swim both for the pleasure and necessity of being carried by waves, rather than to reach an objective associated with accomplishment or gratification. A resilience on the run may entail a choice not to identify autonomy with control over time, but rather with the capacity to improvise in the face of emergent contingency.

The constant work of evaluative comparison via the practices of social media is a struggle with temporality. Images of the near past are read in the present and interpreted variously as indicators of what one should achieve in the future, or of what one has failed to accomplish in the present. The yearning for release from this labour of marking life attainments in time can be understood as a movement towards such an autonomy.

In shifting conditions, rapid change calls for rapid response. If it is less and less possible to avert future risk in the face of intense social discontinuity, then potentially the labour of the self also entails a form of rational agency. This rational agency requires one to relinquish fantasies of living into the outcomes of pre-planned choices; or expecting to accrue predictable benefits from investment in risk reduction efforts. This new form of agency in response to changing life patterns calls for an accompanying form of existential labour. In this social scenario shaped by temporal disjunctures, tensions are created between those social norms which valorise and individualise a choice biography, and a set of futures which refuse to comply with that which was intended or promised. The subject must find ways to craft an intelligible life, and make meaning adhere despite a disrupted logic of progression through time. Thus subjectivities must be continually shaped inside new temporalities (Leccardi 2017).

The meaning of autonomy shifts in these conditions of rapid and unpredictable change. It may entail the agreement to suspend control, rather than the effort to be in control of one’s life time.

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