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COPYRIGHT 2000 JAI Press, Inc.
INTRODUCTION
The association of activity with well-being in old age seems so obvious and indisputable that questioning it within gerontological circles would be considered unprofessional, if not heretical. The notion of activity, a recurring motif in popular treatises on longevity since the Enlightenment, today serves as an antidote to pessimistic stereotypes of decline and dependency. Indeed, Francis Bacon's nostrum that older individuals should "live a retired kind of life" but that "their minds and thoughts should not be addicted to idlenesse" (1977:180), would not be out of place as a credo of modern gerontology and associated healthcare professions that promote activity as a positive ideal.(1) Therefore, activity in old age appears to be a universal "good," and to prove it, a host of gerontological studies convincingly demonstrates the benefits of physical and social activities to those who must cope with illness, loneliness, disability, and trauma. Of the many examples in the literature, Patterson and Carpenter (1994) showed how greater participation by widows and widowers in leisure activities helped maintain higher morale, and Misra, Alexy, and Panigrahi (1996) examined the positive relationship between physical exercise, self-esteem, and self-rated perceptions of health among a group of older women, the majority of whom lived alone.
However, activity is also a relatively recent conceptual and ethical keyword that has helped to shape gerontology and our understanding of later life. For these reasons, reflecting upon activity's unique intellectual status and practical importance within the field is a worthwhile exercise, apart from elaborating the gerontological nexus connecting activity, health, and successful aging. More specifically, in this article I wish to explore some of the critical intersections between activity and regimes of care and lifestyle with a focus on the management of everyday life in old age. In so doing, I seek to raise three questions: (1) what does the concept of activity reveal about the theoretical and empirical means by which gerontological knowledge and gerontological subjects are brought together; (2) how have researchers and professionals formulated activity as an instrument to administer, calculate, and codify everyday conduct in institutional and recreational environments; and (3) what role might activity also play as a resource for those who contest the normalization of old age through activity regimes. Conclusions ponder the wider contexts of activity where the declining welfare state has encouraged neoliberal policies and market-driven programs to "empower" older individuals to be active to avoid the stigma and risks of dependency.(2)
But what is activity? Despite the pervasiveness of the term in gerontological research, there is no universal definition or standard science of activity. There are certainly different forms of activity referred to by gerontologists; in particular, activity as physical movement, activity as the pursuit of everyday interests, and activity as social participation. Although these forms are studied and promoted both separately and jointly, it is apparent that the idea of activity courses through a gerontological web of theories, programs, and schools of thought whose influence and status are based less on what activity means than on where it is utilized (which is everywhere). Thus, mapping the circuitry of activity within a field of practices--as a gerontological theory, an empirical and professional instrument, a critical vocabulary for narratives of the self, a new cultural ideal, and a political rationality, among other things--might better account for its widespread appeal in discourses on aging than simply tracing the progress of formal activity models within gerontology. Nevertheless, such models provide a point of departure from which to consider how the idea of activity first entered gerontological thinking and practice.
ACTIVITY AS A GERONTOLOGICAL THEORY AND THE PROBLEMATIZATION OF ADJUSTMENT
In the postwar period, American gerontologists adapted social science perspectives to the study of aging to expand it beyond medical and social welfare models. Two important formations in this undertaking were the Gerontological Society in 1945 and The Journal of Gerontology in 1946. The American Social Science Research Council had earlier established the Committee on Social Adjustment in Old Age in 1944. Under its auspices, Otto Pollak published the influential Social Adjustment in Old Age (1948). A second text, Personal Adjustment in Old Age, by University of Chicago researcher Ruth S. Cavan and her colleagues followed in 1949. It was an equally significant indicator of the new convergence on adjustment. Why adjustment? Not, it seems, because it was developed as a rigorously theoretical concept. The definition provided by Cavan et al. that "personal adjustment finds its context in social adjustment" and that "social adjustment" facilitates "personal adjustment" (1949:11) hardly seemed to break new intellectual ground. Rather, adjustment was a complex problem that encouraged researchers to explain new social issues of aging and retirement according to the dominant paradigms of the time such as functionalism, individualism, and role theory. For example, research on adjustment consolidated data on individual adaptation, attitude, satisfaction, morale, and happiness into quantifiable indicators of the problems of aging.
To revisit adjustment as a focal point for a wide array of professional ideas and social contexts, it would be useful to consider it as a problematization in the sense of the term used by Michel Foucault. For Foucault, a problematization involves a set of practices that transforms a realm of human existence into a crisis of thought. Foucault stated,
For a domain of action, a behavior, to enter the field of thought, it is necessary for a certain number of factors to have made it uncertain, to have made it lose its familiarity, or to have provoked a certain number of difficulties around it. These elements result from social, economic, or political processes. But here their only role is that of instigation. They can exist and perform their action for a very long time, before there is effective problemization by thought. And when thought intervenes, it doesn't assume a unique form that is the direct result of the necessary expression of these difficulties; it is an original or specific response --often taking many forms. (1984:388-389)
Hence, problematizing practices discipline everyday life by transforming ordinary and sometimes arbitrary aspects of human existence--such as adjustment to retirement--into universal dilemmas that call for administrative and professional interventions buoyed by a politics of "thought." Indeed, Foucault summarized his life's work as a series of studies about how normalizing practices problematized madness and illness (Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic), how punitive practices problematized crime (Discipline and Punish), and how practices of the self problematized sexuality (History of Sexuality series) (1985:10-12). In his work on ancient aesthetics and "the arts of existence," Foucault asked: "How, why, and in what forms was sexuality constituted as a moral domain? Why this ethical concern that was so persistent despite its varying forms, and intensity? Why this `problematization'?" (1985:10). Following Foucault, we might also ask how, why, and in what forms was active adjustment to old age constituted as an ethical domain, and why has this ethical form become so persistent despite its varying forms and intensity? Addressing this question leads to our tracking the persistency of activity and adjustment in relation to the social problems to which they appeared as fitting conceptual, ethical, and practical solutions as well as in the professional discourses that framed them as such.
Foucault also argued that the power/knowledge arrangements that arise out of a particular problematization often endure beyond its initial crisis to supplement other political movements. In a related way, the academic focus on individual adjustment eventually lost its prominence as social gerontologists proceeded to cultivate sociological notions of social role, social status, subculture, senior citizen, stereotype, generation, class, ethnicity, and gender. As an intervention by "thought" into the dilemmas of the new labor, welfare, and retirement cultures of the postwar period, however, adjustment, with its cluster of theoretical, practical, ethical, and professional issues, became a benchmark problematization that gave rise to the ideal of activity within aging studies. This emerged most clearly in the University of...
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