Jajuna

Below is some writing I have been doing on the question of citizenship. Some of these ideas may make their way into an article I am trying to develop on citizenship and education, however, probably not until there has been quite a bit of rethinking and developing.

Beyond Modern Citizenship: Citizenship as a Contested Social Process  

In his seminal essay, “Citizenship and Social Class”, T.H. Marshall articulated what is arguably the paradigmatic statement on modern citizenship. Proffered at the outset of post-war Keynesian expansion in the UK, Marshall argued that citizenship followed an evolutionary and progressive historical logic. Along with firmly equating citizenship with legal status in a nation-state, Marshall delineated three forms of citizenship rights: civil rights (freedom of speech, thought, and the right to justice), political rights (right to vote and participate), social rights (economic security, health care, social welfare). Each form of rights was understood to result from socioeconomic and political developments culminating in the rise of social rights under the welfare state. Since its initial reception, Marshall’s arguments have been debated and critiqued on a variety of grounds. Among the most common criticisms are that Marshall’s account both ignored the immanent exclusions upon which modern citizenship was founded and simultaneously did not account for how class conflicts and racial and gender antagonisms have historically shaped citizenship across Western democratic states. Bryan Turner suggests that the citizen within Marshall’s progressive narrative is imagined as a “passive” recipient of rights rather than as an active political subject. It thus elides how subjects have historically made claims and struggled to define and achieve social recognition, legal rights, and what it means to practice substantive citizenship. Furthermore, scholars have offered various challenges to the idea that these practices occur only or primarily at the scale of the nation-state.

Isin and Turner argue that modern theories like Marshall’s “no longer capture the changing nature of citizenship in the twenty-first century”. In particular, they suggest that the twin processes of ‘globalization’ and ‘postmodernization’ have upended the notion that the nation-state is the sole authority and scale at which citizenship and democracy are negotiated. Isin and Turner are hardly alone in this assessment. There is now a broad consensus that globalization and postmodernization have expanded the scales and forms in which citizenship is imagined and practiced.  First, in terms of globalization, scholars have importantly drawn to our attention to how intensified global flows of capital, information, culture, technology, labor and people have combined with new synergies between urban, regional, and transnational economic, public health, and ecological systems to put new pressures and limitations on the nation-state. It is argued that these processes have rescaled citizenship upward through developments like “dual citizenship statuses” and “multileveled” or “nested” forms of membership such as in the European Union. Moreover, trends toward transnational forms of governance and global human rights have produced visions for achieving “postnational citizenship”, “world citizenship”, “cosmopolitan citizenship”, and “citizenship beyond the state”.

Second, as we enter what has variably been described as “late”, “post”, or even, “liquid” modernity, we have witnessed the proliferation of claims to social recognition and redistribution throughout the Global North and South. This has been described as indicative of a downward scaling of citizenship where the universalistic referents of the nation are displaced through multiple and overlapping forms of social identification, identity, and community. Here historically marginalized groups and activists have increasingly voiced claims for ethnic and racial justice, gender equality, immigrant rights, indigenous rights, disability rights, LGTB rights, and environmental justice and in the process drawn renewed attention to citizenship as a political practice and site of struggle. This has been accompanied by a proliferation of concepts like “multicultural citizenship”, “sexual citizenship”, “indigenous citizenship”, and “environmental citizenship” describing the various identifications, sites, and zones through which one might enact citizenship. Postmodernization is thus implicated in concerns over multicultural and group differentiated rights as well as considerations over how various identities, groups, and social issues become sites for the articulation of new claims to citizenship and social justice.

While globalization and postmodernization have led to the expansion of new transnational and local citizenship identifications and practices, scholars have also raised concerns over the perceived erosion of citizenship particularly in Anglophone nations. These concerns are largely rooted in the dismantling of the social rights and provisions of the welfare state and the corollary rise of neoliberalization over the last three decades. On a structural level, scholars have contended that neoliberalization has “rolled back” and “hollowed out” the social rights accorded to citizens under the welfare state. This has gone hand in hand with deregulatory regimes, privatization, and the elevation of the market as the primary referent and arbiter of social policy. Citizenship is thus reframed through consumer as opposed to social norms and the citizen is refigured through their capacity to manage their own risk and maximize their entrepreneurial capacities. On a cultural level, this has inspired critiques centered on the loss of what Habermas has referred to as publicity: the public spaces, places, networks, values, attitudes, vocabularies, and spheres within and through which individuals can practice substantive citizenship. Thinkers from across the humanities and social sciences including Robert Putnam, Amatai Etzioni, Nancy Fraser, Chantel Mouffe,  Henry Giroux - along with many others - have from a variety of theoretical and political valences written about a decline of public space and civic engagement and its iniquitous effects on democratic culture including the expansion of social inequality within the contemporary era.

Do to the interweaving processes of globalization, postmodernization, and neoliberalization there is ample reason to suggest that the state centric and progressive narrative offered by modernist conceptions of citizenship no longer capture the complexity and contested nature of contemporary citizenship. This of course is not to suggest that legal status and formal rights no longer matter. Clearly, if anything, the intensified flows of immigrants, migrant workers, stateless persons, and refugees brought on by globalization has given new urgency to questions concerning legal status and citizenship rights as they are articulated and struggled over in variable ways across national and institutional territories. However, it is also clear that formal membership and political rights and obligations are not the only terrain upon which citizenship is imagined, contested, and practiced. On one hand, citizenship has been expanded through new transnational norms and identifications while simultaneously demands made by new social movements including immigrant rights movements have downwardly scaled citizenship onto a field of identities, group affiliations, and overlapping communities of interest. On the other hand, there is broad concern that market forces and cultural trends have eroded the substance of citizenship subordinating democratic values to the interests and exigencies of late-capitalism and in the process created new patterns of marginalization and social inequality.

Contemporary citizenship thus represents a highly contested and paradoxical category. Isin and Turner suggest that for these reasons citizenship must be understood not only as a legal status and collection of rights and obligations but as “a social process through which individuals and social groups engage in claiming, expanding, or losing rights”.  Within this “sociological” reading of citizenship the “emphasis is less on legal rules and more on norms, practices, meanings and identities” locating citizenship at the intersection of power, subjectivity, and processes of belonging and exclusion. It thus importantly shifts the ground of analysis to questions concerning the sites, scales, norms, and power relations through which citizenship is produced and negotiated as both a legal distinction and also importantly as a social construct and practice intimately connected to political subjectivity and social equity.

Governmentality and the Re-Specification of Citizenship

Michel Foucault’s notion of governmentality has become a dynamic conceptual tool for connecting citizenship to broader “mentalities” and “technologies” of rule within Western democratic states. In his lectures at College de France in the late 1970s, Foucault developed a unique analytical approach to the “art of government”, or as he put it, the problem which since the sixteenth century has been concerned with “how to be ruled, by whom, to what ends, and by what methods” (Foucault, 1991, p.88). Extending the genealogical investigations which he began in Discipline and Punish (1977) and A History of Sexuality Vol 1 (1978), Foucault’s perspective on government runs against the grain of traditional liberal and Marxist theories. By locating power beyond the state, Foucault connects government to broader ethico-political questions concerning political expertise, authority, and the regulation of the self and others across diverse institutional and social fields. Graham Burchell, among others, has argued that this approach to government aids in mapping and problematizing social relations from the “microphysical to the macropolitical”. By destabilizing an image of government lodged only or primarily within the state, it is able to connect relations of power and subjectivity to forms of knowledge and authority across multiple scales and contexts. This has been especially fruitful for considering power, subjectivity, and citizenship particularly as they relate to “neo” or “advanced” liberal regimes of government.

Drawing on Foucault’s detailed genealogies of liberal reason, studies in governmentality have framed neoliberalism as a pervasive political rationality rooted in a normative and constructivist project aimed at the re-specification of all social and political relations within an economic calculus. Perhaps the most salient thread connecting these studies is the notion that neoliberal governmentality attempts to rule foremost “at a distance” by downloading risk from the state onto the individual while utilizing entrepreneurial norms and modes of expertise to elicit subject-citizens to become increasingly responsible for their own governance. Here citizenship is imagined as an “artifact” of government: a potentiality which is shaped toward specific techniques of self-management carved out around competitive entrepreneurial habits and dispositions. The neoliberal subject-citizen is imagined as a risk bearing and rational entrepreneurial agent who learns proper forms of competitive behavior in order to prudently maximize their private interests through the adoption of various lifestyle arrangements, consumer choices, and educational investments. The “actuarial” or “enterprise self” is thus charged with reflexively navigating economic, ecological, and personal decisions by offsetting risk and constructing their life through therapeutic encounters, self-help, life-long learning, and by prudently discerning among the advice of experts. However, this does not mean a marked decline in the governing capacities of the state. Rather, under neoliberal forms of governance, the state actively seeks to create and maximize these entrepreneurial behaviors through a wide-range of policies and programs such as educational and health markets, welfare reform, zero tolerance policing (as opposed to rehabilitation), and new social audit and accountability structures. As Brown suggests, “because neoliberalism casts rational action as a norm rather than as an ontology, social policy is the means by which by which the state produces subjects whose compass is set entirely by their rational assessment of the costs and benefits of certain acts, whether those acts refer to teen pregnancy, tax fraud, or retirement planning”.

Another important line of thinking that has emerged from the governmentality scholarship is the notion of “governing through communities”. While the perceived democratic role and purpose of community is a matter of extensive debate among communitarians, liberals, radical democrats, and “third-way” theorists, studies in governmentality have taken a decidedly non-evaluative tack. These studies have instead utilized a “diagnostic” approach in order to elaborate how competing discourses and identifications of community function as technologies through which political subjectivity and citizenship become shaped. For example, they have examined the material and discursive aspects of policy initiatives aimed at curbing “dependency” through efforts to “empower” citizens through community organizations, voluntary associations, neighborhood action zones, welfare for work programs, and parental involvement initiatives by local school districts. It is suggested that these processes are linked to the various ways post-social regimes of citizenship are articulated and governed through a re-specified understanding of the connection between subjects and civil society. As the state, particularly in Anglophone nations, has rolled-back guarantees of social rights under the welfare state, it has, perhaps paradoxically, looked toward the sphere of civil society as a site for eliciting active citizenship through policies and programs which target citizen and community involvement. According to Deforges et al,

whereas the mode of ‘managed liberalism’ that was dominant in most post-war advanced liberal democracies prioritized the ‘national citizen’ in its emphasis on the security of social, political and economic rights at the national scale, the new modes of ‘governing through communities’ shifts the emphasis to the practice of responsibilities by ‘active citizens’ in sub-national communities.

The citizen becomes imagined less as a subject of collective rights and collective responsibilities under the primary referent of the nation, and more as an active entrepreneurial agent charged with negotiating political identity and risk within a network of overlapping identifications. This includes those relations of trust, affinity, and solidarity - including ethnic, sexual, regional, cultural, and consumer orientations - through which subjects share common values, commitments, material interests, lifestyle distinctions, dispositions, and various forms of capital. Under advanced liberal technologies of government attempts are made to colonize these plural networks of affinity and to shape them in service to entrepreneurial norms. Citizens in turn are charged with independently managing their security and well being through these connections.

Citizenship is thus understood as a “multilayered” process “articulated by engagement with different scales of political authority and with a range of other identities”. However, this understanding of government through community has importantly meant a revived interest in the relationship between place and citizenship. Deforges et al suggest that

the place-rootedness of citizenship was diluted by the assertion of the nation-state and of national citizenship from the late eighteenth century onwards, but the recent transition in governmentality has arguably remade the connection: active citizens act for and within place-based community.

This has a number of consequences. First, “the capacity of a community to act according to normative models of active citizenship and community action is shaped by the characteristics of the place”. This indicates that historical, institutional, economic, and sociopolitical factors produce “uneven geographies of local citizen action”. Second, “active citizens are judged to have succeeded or failed as citizens as a place-based community, with repercussions for further treatment by the state”. This represents a fundamental tension at the limits of entrepreneurial forms of citizenship and models of community governance. As community is refigured through the referents of the market, fiscal/social austerity is viewed as necessary to spur competitive engagement, effectively denying the salience of social marginalization on the basis that the market affords to all the same mechanism of social advancement. Thus regardless of historically structured barriers and/or the “thinning” of social and collective provisions and commitments, the inability for communities to meet normative criteria for entrepreneurial engagement can lead to the further withdrawal of state support and the naturalization/justification of social inequalities along the lines of race, class, ethnicity, and gender.

As this discussion of place and community suggests, the governmentality literature has made important contributions for thinking through questions concerning citizenship and social marginalization. Nikolas Rose has suggested that while the “enterprise self” may represent the most privileged subject of contemporary regimes of citizenship, it exists always in relation to that which it opposes. He states that “the new image of citizenship must be understood in relation to that which opposes it, a kind of anti-citizen that is a constant enticement and threat to the project of citizenship itself”. Anti-citizens are imagined as those subjects and communities who regardless of their class, race, gender, or legal status fail to expertly manage their own risk and maximize their own economic potential. These are subjects whom no matter the barriers or circumstances have not learned to appropriately act upon their competitive freedom – i.e. the poor, unemployed, single-mothers, “at-risk” youth, and the racialized “Others” inhabiting the “deviant” zones of the so-called “underclass”. These abject citizens are understood “not in terms of substantive characteristics but in relational terms; that is, it is a question of their distance to the circuits of virtuous citizenship”.

Experimental Theories: Citizenship as an Affective, Aesthetic, and Activist Process

While offering a unique set of theoretical and methodological tools for mapping contemporary regimes of citizenship, studies in governmentality have encountered limitations. In particular, scholarship in citizenship studies has begun to challenge the normative image of the rational and calculative subject-citizen at the center of neoliberal reason. Specifically, these inquiries are beginning to consider the relationship between citizenship and human embodiment particularly the role of emotions and affect in the negotiation of political subjectivity. Simply put, citizens are not governed nor do they govern themselves solely by actuarial and calculative choices, nor are they governed exclusively through social identifications and multileveled networks of community, rather, citizenship is always imagined, governed and practiced within emotional and affective relations and tensions.

Isin has suggested that social science perspectives - from “reflexive modernization” and “risk society” theories to Foucauldian inspired researches into liberal and neoliberal rationalities of power - have mistakenly constructed an “overcharged and overburdened image of the citizen”. He refers to this image of the citizen as the “bionic” citizen: a citizen stripped of all embodiments who efficiently manages and speaks the truth of their own personal conduct through calculative and rational means. According to Isin, “by interpreting the liberal and neoliberal subject as the bionic citizen, who was self-sufficient, self-regarding and was governed through their freedom, we may have unconsciously participated in the production of a phantasy”. In contrast, Isin suggests that citizens conduct themselves and are governed always in tension between rational deliberative strategies and various affective dispositions, anxieties, and insecurities. Here the citizen is imagined less “as a rational, calculating, and competent subject who can evaluate alternatives with relative success to avoid or eliminate risks and more as someone who is anxious, under stress, and increasingly insecure and is asked to manage its neurosis”. For Isin, these interrelations between citizenship and affect can be observed in a number of fields and practices of the self: diet, exercise, and anxieties over the body; environmental campaigns to recycle and engage in “green consumption”; the securitization of the private sphere through the adoption of home surveillance technologies; and the militarization of national borders amid heightened anxieties over non-status “alien invaders”.

Moreover, such links between affect and citizenship have not been lost on economists and/or policy-makers. For example, drawing on neoliberal thinkers like Milton Friedman, cognitive science, and what is being called “neuroeconomics”, economists Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein (informal advisors to US President Barack Obama) have outlined a social policy diagram based on what they refer to as “choice architecture” and/or “libertarian paternalism”. They, like Isin, argue that subjects rely on both “automatic” (affective) and “reflective” (rational) systems when making decisions concerning economic, health, educational, environmental, and personal matters and that the “automatic” system often leads to poorly “informed” choices. In response, they suggest policy makers design “choice environments” that override affective interferences by “nudging” subjects toward particular policy goals. Libertarian paternalism thus locates citizenship as a field to be ordered and steered toward pre-determined structures of action. This is problematic for a variety of reasons not least because Thaler and Sunstein present a limited view of human agency while assuming a relatively stable consensus regarding the values (economic value and social efficiency) in which policy goals should be oriented. What is important to highlight here, however, is that such policy frameworks based on more sophisticated understandings of affect and embodied judgments may importantly hint toward emergent post-neoliberal rationalities of government and constructions of citizenship.   

Along with concerns over embodiment and affect, social and political thought has found a renewed interest in the relationship between aesthetics and citizenship. Much of this can be attributed to the philosophy of Jacques Ranciere who has offered some original and compelling frames for thinking about the relation between aesthetics and democratic politics. For Rancière, aesthetics refer to the fields of visibility and sayability where parts of the political community are ordered, where shares and allotments are arranged, and distributions of rights and commitments are legitimated. Rancière refers to this as the “distribution of the sensible” by which he means the ordering of bodies, roles, and shares in unequal, yet, normalized frames of perceptual reference. For Ranicere, citizenship is enacted through moments of “dissensus”: moments of rupture whereby an individual or a collective with an unequal standing in the social body disrupts the partition of the sensible in order to assert their equality, and thus, their presence within the political community. “Political activity is whatever shifts a body from the place assigned to it or changes a places destination. It makes visible what had no business being seen, and makes heard a discourse where once there was only a place for noise” (p. 30). Ranciere imagines citizenship as a disturbance in the continuity of perception where subjects formerly denied their recognition become constituted as equal citizens of the demos. Thus citizenship is understood as the political event of democracy.

Engin Isin and colleagues have taken an aesthetic and activist conception of citizenship even further. In the edited collection “Acts of Citizenship”, Isin et al outline an agenda for citizenship studies that is irreducible to either concerns over legal status and/or to habitus: those embodied dispositions, values, perceptions, and practices which develop over relatively long periods of time. Isin states that “critical studies of citizenship over the last two decades have taught us that what is important is not only that citizenship is a legal status but that it also involves practices of making citizens – social, political, cultural, and symbolic”. While “many scholars now differentiate formal citizenship and substantive citizenship and consider the latter to be the condition of possibility of the former”, Isin claims that these studies have not gone far enough in examining the conditions in which subjects become political actors and thus enact substantive citizenship. Isin suggests that this oversight is rooted in the historical tendencies of social and political thought to examine how orders, norms, disciplines, and conducts are constructed and governed. In contrast, he proposes that citizenship be studied from the standpoint of “acts”: singular moments, ruptures, and deeds whereby subjects enact citizenship through creative forms of political claims-making. Echoing Ranciere, Isin states that “the essence of an act, as distinct from conduct, practice, behavior and habit, is that an act is a rupture in the given”. Investigating acts of citizenship, then, shifts our theoretical emphasis from “problems of orders and practices” to the conditions where “creative breaks” with habitus are made possible and through which political subjects emerge as citizens. Not to be mistaken for yet another call for investigating “active” citizenship, Isin makes a clear and important distinction between “active citizens” - those who simply “act out already written scripts” - and “activist citizens” - those who “engage in writing scripts”. He states that while “activist citizens are creative, active citizens are not”.