ABSTRACT

In the previous chapter, I suggested that to address the challenges of the ageing society, we should focus on developing a conceptual framework that tackles the uncertainty, multiplicity and complexity of the scientific practices and technological processes that sustain it, and that this was best done through an engagement with the science and technology studies scholarly corpus. In particular, I argued that both sides of the nexus of ageing and technoscience should be open to investigation, resulting in a programme of research concerned with understanding how distributions of agency are enacted and pragmatically relate to each other. This, in turn, was motivated by the aim to genealogically trace the ‘the heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent with itself ’ (Foucault, 1991: 82): the ageing society. But what is the ageing society, from this knowledgerelated, epistemic perspective? In the introduction, I suggested that the usual answer to this question relates to the social, economic and political consequences that are seen to emerge from changes in population structure. Experts and policy makers disagree about what those consequences are, some viewing them as dictating fundamental changes to the nature of citizenship, while others see them as an opportunity, fostering technological and social innovation and creativity. I have further argued that rather than seeking to assess the rightfulness of each position there is work to be done in understanding the forms of knowledge, the institutional basis and the normative foundations of each of the arguments. This means that instead of asking for the facts that make the ageing society – its population dynamics, etc. – we ask: how, through what means and for what reasons did our societies come to be seen and described as ‘ageing societies’? How did the label of ‘ageing society’ become an authoritative and accepted description of our shared lives, of our present condition and common future? How did it come to be ‘gathered in a thing’, and what technoscientific practices and processes ‘make it exist and maintain its existence’ (Latour, 2004: 246)? This is the question this chapter, drawing on the approach previously outlined, aims to address. Taking as a point of departure key characterisations of the ‘ageing society’ articulated since the turn of the century, I then outline a genealogy of the

relationship between the ‘population problem’ and the economy, articulated explicitly in actuarial sciences in the nineteenth century, and ultimately in the emergence of state-backed social security in liberal democracies. However, I suggest that the ageing society is in fact a questioning of the epistemic infrastructure of the liberal welfare state, a problematisation especially evident in the ‘social security crises’ of the early 1980s. As I will demonstrate, those crises were principally about the validity and reliability of expert knowledge, in that they concerned the failure of demographic calculations and economic forecasting to accurately predict increased life expectancies and correlated balances of social security programmes. In the last section of the chapter, I suggest that this recognition of the epistemic but unstable underpinning of the ‘ageing society’ served as the context to rebuild a research agenda for the ‘ageing society’ from the 1980s to the present day.