ABSTRACT
The human biography is in a state of flux. No longer determined by traditional identities, the human being has become ‘a choice among possibilities, homo optionis’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2003: 5). Even the most fundamental aspects of daily living are characterised by a plurality of ‘choice’: life, death, gender, corporeality, identity, religion, marriage, parenthood, social ties – all become negotiable, ‘decidable down to the small print’ (2003: 5). And from the era of ‘choice’ emerges an ethic – an ethic of individual self-fulfilment where the ‘choosing, deciding, shaping being who aspires to be the author of his or her own life, the creator of an individual identity, is the central character of our time’ (2003: 22). But the concept of ‘choice’ should not fool us here – the notion of self-determination is ‘compulsive and obligatory’ (2003: xv). So while ‘individualisation’ heralds the end of ‘fixed, predefined images of man’ (2003: 5), in the sense that the individual’s biography is released from ‘given determinations’ and placed under the control of the self, it also means being ‘forced to live a more reflective life towards an open future’ (Giddens, 1999b). In other words, faced with a plurality of lifestyle choices where ‘the signposts established by tradition now are blank’, we have ‘no choice but to choose’ (Giddens, 1991: 82).
