Lifestyle Politics and Radical Activism

Laura Portwood-Stacer

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781441105127
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Anarchism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Attempts by people to enact their political beliefs in their daily lives have become commonplace in contemporary US culture, in spheres ranging from shopping habits to romantic attachments. This groundbreaking book examines how collective social movements have cultivated individual practices of "lifestyle politics" as part of their strategies of resistance, and the tensions they must navigate in doing so. Drawing on feminism and other movements that claim that "the personal is political, " the book explores how radical anarchist activists position their own lifestyles within projects of resistance. Various lifestyle practices, from consumption to personal style to sexual relationships, are studied to address how identity and cultural practices can be used as tools of political dissent. An accessible and provocative text, Lifestyle Politics and Radical Activism blends theory with empirical materials to highlight issues that are important not only to anarchists, but also to anyone struggling for social change. This unique analysis will contribute to the development of anarchist theory and practice and will appeal to anyone interested in political activism and social movements.

1

Introduction

In March of 2009, I had a long conversation with a young woman named Raychel,¹ a college student and self-identified anarchist. We had met a few weeks previously, at an “anarcha-feminist picnic” in Los Angeles, which she had helped organize. I asked her to meet with me one-on-one for a chat, and we sat down together in a coffee house near her communal home in Long Beach. She rode her bicycle there; she consciously decided not to own a car, a notable choice in Southern California. She sported a short, asymmetrical haircut, had her septum pierced, and wore large plugs in her stretched earlobes. Raychel had spent her adolescence in the Orange County punk scene, and had recently become involved with militant animal rights organizing. We talked for almost 2 hours about her experiences doing activism for anarchist, feminist, vegan, and “genderqueer” causes, and how she tried to integrate her radical politics into her everyday life. Toward the end of our conversation, she commented:

. . . it gets abstract sometimes, because it’s like, where do I attack it, where do I attack patriarchy, where do I attack capitalism? And that’s why I think lifestylism is so important, cuz I think that you do attack it by being vegan, or by not buying from Walmart, or not being subjected by the beauty standards. Like, by building those alternative communities and alternative infrastructure, we’re not paying attention to them, so we’re not demanding anything from them.

Raychel seemed to evince a faith in the power of individual choices to make a difference in political realities. She felt she had a responsibility to resist oppressive forces in her daily life, and she also felt she could empower herself and her peers by refusing to engage with the cultural practices engendered by patriarchy and capitalism.

As an anarchist, Raychel’s critique of existing power structures is far-reaching, and separates her from the mainstream in the contemporary United States. Anarchism is a radical political philosophy, meaning that its vision for an ideal society involves a drastic restructuring of the fundamental institutions of power, including but not limited to an overturning of capitalism and the state. Yet, anarchists like Raychel have something important in common with more mainstream citizens—the cherished belief that “one person can make a difference” in the pursuit of a better society. When individuals who desire social or political change are compelled to shape their own personal behaviors and choices toward the ideals they envision, this is known as lifestyle politics. While the stakes of each specific episode of activism may be low, the moments of confrontation are multiplied for radical lifestyle activists because every minute decision one makes is implicated in a fight for a new society. The way one dresses, the food one eats, even the people one chooses to have sex with, can become overtly political acts. Radical lifestyle politics reconfigures the everyday life of the individual into an ongoing struggle against domination.

Writing in the 1970s, anarchist ecologist Murray Bookchin (1979: 265) argued:

. . . the revolutionary movement is profoundly concerned with lifestyle. It must try to live the revolution in all its totality, not only participate in it. It must be deeply concerned with the way the revolutionist lives, his relations with the surrounding environment, and his degree of self-emancipation.

Like the counterculturalists with whom he was in dialogue, Bookchin felt that activists had a responsibility both to live according to their political ideals and to visibly demonstrate the viability of radically different ways of life. With this view, he implicitly subscribed to the feminist adage that “the personal is political” (Evans 1979). Four decades later, this principle has become a truism of contemporary citizenship, and not just for self-identified revolutionaries. It’s the premise upon which corporations are able to market “ethical” products to consumers and people regularly include their political beliefs in their personal profiles on online social networks. A cultural study of the practices and discourses of lifestyle-based activism (what Raychel called “lifestylism”) can thus illuminate what it means to do politics and to be political today. This book asks, what are the effects of this kind of lifestyle politics? What does it really mean that people are trying to do politics in this way, and what are they accomplishing through their efforts?

I argue that some of the most significant “effects” of lifestyle activism are personal and cultural, and may not be recognizable within narrow understandings of the political. The many personal and cultural needs served by lifestyle politics within contemporary society mean that this form of activism cannot be dismissed as simply ineffective for radical movements. Lifestyle is a major site for the constitution of identity and community among anarchist activists. Shared ways of life bring together diffuse collections of political subjects, and symbolically represent them as a unified movement seeking changes in existing political conditions. The lifestyle practices of contemporary anarchists are also meaningful in so far as they materially enact (or violate) anarchic social relations. Lifestyles may reinforce boundaries between radicals and non-radicals, and among radical activists themselves. The effects of anarchists’ ways of life are multifaceted and at times contradictory. A lifestyle practice like veganism may shore up an individual’s sense of moral integrity, but it may also be easily co-opted by a capitalist consumer market. A uniquely anarchist style of dress may foster an internal sense of community within the movement, but may also alienate outsiders. A sexual arrangement like polyamory may provide an alternative to state-sponsored monogamous marriage, but it may also prove emotionally daunting for the individuals involved. Even using the term “anarchist” to refer to oneself may prove to be confusing, even while it is simultaneously empowering. These contradictory outcomes suggest that lifestyle activism cannot be fully successful at achieving all the goals that radicals might hold.

While one response to this failure might be to reject lifestyle politics altogether (as some critics have done),² a more practical move for activists is to embrace an attitude of trial and error in which outcomes are understood to be context dependent. Any strategic assessment of lifestyle tactics must take into account the range of its potential functions. Assessments must also examine the conditions under which different effects are likely to be realized, and for whom. What is at stake is an understanding of how to effect political change, and how the effects activists sometimes imagine may be more or less achieved, or may be counteracted by effects they haven’t quite stopped to think about yet. The question is not, “Is lifestyle an effective site for radical political activism?” Rather, this book offers answers to the questions, “what kinds of political acts are possible within the sphere of lifestyle?” and “how do particular conditions enable lifestyle activism to be effective in those ways?”

A through line in each of the cases presented in this book is the communicative dimension of all political lifestyle practices. Lifestyle activism is premised, both explicitly and implicitly, on the performative and propagandistic effects of its practices. Sociologist Alberto Melucci (1985: 812) suggests that practitioners of cultural resistance are themselves a form of “new media,” who, through their activities, “enlighten what every system doesn’t say of itself, the amount of silence, violence, irrationality, which is always hidden in dominant codes.” Melucci goes on to say that, “through what they do, or rather through how they do it, movements announce to society that something ‘else’ is possible.” This book examines how, and under what conditions, radical activists are able to make their lifestyles into communicative performances that effectively make the kind of “announcement” that Melucci suggests.

A life that is completely free from hierarchical power relations is impossible to achieve within contemporary material and ideological conditions—no individual can achieve anarchist purity. Despite this, the individuals discussed in this book still try to make their everyday lives congruent with their utopian political ideals. Here, I describe their attempts, in order to understand what they do accomplish, and how this might guide other ongoing struggles to make a better world. This book also reveals the intense labor of trying to “live one’s politics,” especially when those politics are oppositional to the status quo. Although I take a critical approach to radical activists’ use of lifestyle politics, this critique should be understood as a way of “caring for and even renewing the object in question” (Brown 2005: x). I approach this project from a position of sympathy and solidarity with radical activists. While I do not personally self-identify as an anarchist, I take anarchism seriously as a political philosophy, and feel it has much to offer in the way of alternatives to hierarchical distributions of power.³

Definitions: Lifestyle, lifestyle politics, lifestyle activism, and lifestylism

Lifestyle is a set of routine choices an individual makes about practices as various as dress, diet, housing, leisure activities, and more (Weber 1978).⁴ These lifestyle choices signify who people are and who they want to be (Featherstone 1987). For instance, participants in “ethical consumption” communicate through their choices that they are environmentally conscious or sensitive to social justice issues.⁵ Lifestyle also extends beyond consumption activities to the language one uses, the choices one makes about marriage and family, the career path one pursues, and so on. These are all elements of what sociologist Anthony Giddens (1991: 5) has called the “reflexive project of the self” which arises when individuals attempt to create coherent narratives of their lives while choosing from what lifestyle scholar Sam Binkley (2007a: 116) describes as the “overwhelming range of options” made available to them in consumer societies.

Lifestyle choices that depart from the mainstream are particularly noticeable and they seem to indicate an active effort to differentiate from the status quo. Such alternative lifestyles often bespeak alternative ways of thinking about society, sometimes extending to radical visions for how society should change. Individuals who hold radical political beliefs may see their cumulative daily choices as a reflection of their political integrity and authenticity (Haenfler et al. 2012: 9). A “lifestyle anarchist,” for example, is someone who intentionally lives one’s life according to specifically anarchist principles, attempting to incorporate their political philosophy into the minute activities of everyday life (Purkis and Bowen 2004: 8). When culture is seen as a site of domination, the direct alteration of cultural forms—including lifestyle habits—makes sense as a means of liberation from dominant ideologies (Marcuse 2001; Whittier 1995). I use the term lifestyle politics to refer to the whole cultural formation around individuals’ use of everyday choices as a legitimate site of political expression. The discourse of lifestyle politics reaches beyond radical movements; indeed, it is a feature of mainstream contemporary politics in the United States as well.

Politically inflected lifestyle practices contest divisions between what counts as “the personal” and “the political.” Since personal acts hold political meaning for people, it becomes necessary to rethink what it means to engage in political activism. This book looks at the times in people’s lives that occur between discretely identifiable moments of political involvement and action, since many people who identify as radical activists “integrate movement values into a holistic way of life” (Haenfler et al. 2012: 7). It’s also important to recognize that what counts as activism is a discursive construction. I argue that whether a practice can be considered activism does not depend on the measurable effects of the action, but rather on the meaning people attribute to it. The concept of political communication, too, must be enlarged to account for the symbolic messages that individuals are sending on an everyday basis, outside of “official” political institutions. This book intervenes in previous discussions of political activism and political communication by offering sustained attention to lifestyle as a site where social actors implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, understand these processes to be taking place.

Many sociological accounts of the role of lifestyle in social movements position activists’ turn toward lifestyle as a personalistic retreat from previous forms of political action which were aimed directly at the state (see Beuchler 1995; Kauffman 1990). But many contemporary activist movements (such as the queer and global justice movements) both place heavy investments in personal issues and retain a radical critique of capitalism and the state (Feixa et al. 2009). The conditions of the neoliberal consumer culture that have matured over the past two decades cultivate a climate in which lifestyle activism is a common-sense part of the path toward radical change. There is a need for theory and empirical research that accounts for radicals’ deployment of lifestyle for activist purposes, which I will call lifestyle activism.

It is the case that while political citizenship in general is often enacted within the private sphere of consumption (Cohen 2003), radical political positions in particular are strongly enmeshed within private lifestyle practices. Histories of US activist movements show that radicals have a long tradition of making connections between their political ideologies and their habits of everyday life.⁶ A repressive political environment—one in which active disruption of capitalist processes is strictly policed, for example—pushes radical movements toward private efforts at expressing their dissent, even while engendering that dissent through its repression. Geographer David Harvey (2007) argues that the neoliberal state sees itself as the guarantor of the smooth functioning of consumer markets, given its ideological commitments to private property rights and free markets. This ideology spawns policies under which radical dissent is often quickly squashed in the name of protecting free trade; activists face less threat of repression when they pursue resistance in private, cultural realms.⁷

Harvey and other critics of neoliberalism (e.g. Rose 1999) point out that the same ideology also calls upon individuals to see themselves as “entrepreneurs,” to pursue their own projects of self-enterprise, often in lieu of state welfare provision. The emergence of what cultural scholars Sarah Banet-Weiser and Roopali Mukherjee (2012) term “commodity activism” speaks to the overall cultural environment in which individualized tactics—such as the consumption of commodities—are widely accepted as logical solutions to collective problems. Lifestyle activism has been recognized as an instantiation of this “responsibilization” of individuals to take ownership not only of their own personal well-being, but also of the well-being of society at large (Littler 2009). The emergence of activist projects that seem to have much in common with individualized pursuits of consumer satisfaction is one manifestation of neoliberalism’s effect on culture. Yet, as I will show, the strategic deployment of lifestyle tactics pursued by radical activists is not the same as the astrategic preoccupation with the self encouraged by neoliberal ideology.

As I demonstrate in this book, rather than participating in either lifestyle activism or radical dissent, many anarchists do both, and do not see attention to their lifestyles as separate from their concerns with altering state power and mounting strategic protest. On the contrary, lifestyle practices are heavily politicized among anarchists, and are taken up by them alongside other forms of activism. Anarchists bridge a divide between cultural movements which are oriented toward personal change and political movements which are oriented toward social change. This book therefore fills what sociologists of lifestyle movements Ross Haenfler, Brett Johnson, and Ellis Jones (2012: 2) have called “a scholarly blind spot concealing the intersections of private action and movement participation.” By examining how lifestyle politics works within a radical political formation like anarchism, we can understand the contradictions introduced by modes of activism that both grow out of the conditions of neoliberal consumer culture and attempt to resist these very conditions. Scholars of political activism need to attend to the specific processes and outcomes of lifestyle tactics, in order to understand how these tactics are both empowered and limited by the contexts in which they have emerged.

Isolated tactics of resistance may coalesce into a radical activist strategy when they are discursively articulated to a recognizable way of life with which many individuals can identify.⁸ Subcultural formations enable such recognition—people who feel affinity with a subculture can see themselves and their activities as part of a larger collective of individuals who are living in similar ways and working toward shared goals. The anarchists who are the subject of this book are part of a subcultural formation. They have their own patterns of consumption, sociality, and identity that unite them with each other and set the...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The anti-consumption lifestyle: The cultural work of activist practices
• 3 “I’m not joining your world”: Performing political dissent through spectacular self-presentation
• 4 “You gotta check yourself”: Lifestyle as a site of identification and discipline
• 5 Strategic sexuality: Polyamory, queer self-identification, and consent-seeking as activist interventions
• 6 Bridging the chasm: The contradictions of radical lifestyle politics in neoliberal context
• 7 Conclusion: Learning from lifestyle anarchists
• Notes
• References
• Index