I’ve been out of Melbourne for a short holidays in the desert. Was a good break after a log break I had in Christmas. I think I had enough break for now. I will write soon about the trip in short text and lots of pictures of the desert.

Meanwhile I also been actively reading things about consumers culture. Authors like Celia Lury, Anthony Gidden and Simmons open up some argument related to my research about identity. Giddens introduces me to the understanding between emancipatory politics to life politics.

Anthony Giddens (sociologist) has located the significance of the nation of identity in contemporary society in relation to a movement away from emancipatory politics to life politics. Emancipatory politics in its various forms is seen by Giddens to have concerned with releasing people from the constraints of traditional social positions of class, gender, race and age, by breaking down hierarchies. Clearly, the consumer culture is seen by some as an important process in this breakdown, or at least in the refiguring of these hierarchies, through the resources it offers for more flexible relationship between the individual and the self-identity.

Life politics, in contrast to emancipatory politics, is said to be a politics of self-determination. The protests, campaigns, strikes and rallies associated with emancipatory politics were attempt to reveal the invasion of the people’s everyday lives by social and political forces of domination and exploitation. Life politics is said to work at the different level. It concerns a reflexive relation to the self in which the individual is less concerned with protesting about the actions of others than with taking controls of the shape of his or her own life through the negotiation of self-identity.

The life politics ‘is a politics of self-actualization in a reflexivity links itself and body systems of global scope. As it becomes possible for individual to construct personal identities in a reflexively organized environment, so identity has become a social issues, a topic for public debate, and a site of political change.” Giddens, Anthony (1991:214).