Jajuna

My friend Paul just wrote this terrific piece on debates over the Canadian national anthem and the “deflective” politics of the right wing government.

As some of you may know, the Canadian Conservative government, led by Stephen Harper, has suggested this week that it might take a look at revising the lyrics of “O Canada” in order to make them more gender neutral. Specifically, they are looking at replacing Robert Stanley Weir’s line “in all thy sons command” (to my recollection, this line is often rendered as “in all our sons command”), with the line from Adolphe-Basile Routhier’s original poem “thou dost in us command.” I think that in our ongoing effort to recognise the centrality of music and popular culture in social and cultural life, this deserves comment.

This, of course, is a pretty valuable discussion to have, and one with at least a twenty year-old history. Indeed, why should patriotism only be associated with sons and not daughters? While we’re at it though, we ought to take it further and ask important questions about the music that is supposed to represent the people of this country. Let’s look at the French version, and begin the process of eliminating its gender specificity (“nos aieux” = “our forefathers”). Moreover, let’s ask ourselves whether a country whose indigenous population was largely polytheistic, and whose contemporary population is a grand mixture of people of many religious and non-religious backgrounds, needs an anthem that so prominently features the Christian deity, in both languages—they are, after all “His” sons. One step further. Let’s acknowledge the troubled history of national anthems themselves as emerging out of a violent, colonial, oppressive nationalism, a violence that is reflected in “Car ton bras sait porter l’épée” (“As in thy arm ready to wield the sword”). And finally, we might just take this opportunity to re-examine the term “patriot” itself, and acknowledge its Latin and Greek roots: pater =  father.* I’d say that this is one way to harness the debate and hold the Harperites to the letter on this move. Then we can have a proper discussion about the notion of national political and cultural representation.

In a move sure to cause a vivid debate, I certainly don’t take this as a signal that the Harper government has all of sudden put gender issues on the table as part of its message. No. This is the same party and leader who have objected to same sex marriage and benefits for same-sex couples, who advocated disallowing women to appeal for pay equity, oppose national childcare, cut funding to Status of Women Canada, who wage a vicious war on the poor that disproportionately affects women, and who generally espouse conservative “family values”…the list goes on. Changing a word is unlikely to have material effects on the lives of Canadian women or anyone else.

But what is perhaps most subtly disturbing about this is that it comes at the very same time as a federal budget. As politicos are fond of calling it, this is an example of “deflective” politics. DeBord called it spectacle. The idea is to seed a story so perfectly well-suited for “person on the street,” populist “analysis” that members of the mainstream media simply cannot help themselves; they simply HAVE to cover it, it’s news. It’s also much easier to get a reporter out on the street with a microphone to ask people if they think pronouns** ought to be replaced in the national anthem than it is to ask people what they think about, say, a $3.25 a week increase in Child Tax Benefits ($3.25!?), continued promotion of “corporate welfare,” increased efforts in securitisation (which is, interestingly, also  included in a chapter about “Supporting Families and Communities”)…and this list goes on. Especially after the Olympics, this is the perfect topic to deflect attention away from the budget; it is downright entertaining to see people speak passionately about “owning the podium” and how much it meant to “us” to have the national anthem played more times than any other host country had theirs played. It’s significantly less entertaining to have dry economists point out the failings (or successes) of a budget.

By nature a deflective tactic is also presumed to be less important than the issue from which it is supposed to divert attention; one wouldn’t deflect with something more crucial, that would draw unwanted attention. There is rarely any intention to move forward on the actual substance of the deflection. In this case, I think it would be fair to say that there will be a 50/50 split amongst those people polled who care about the issue, it will gain no real political traction, and it will thus have served its purpose as an entertaining piece of theatre.

But I don’t mean to suggest that the issue is not actually important, in fact, I argue the opposite. Using gender as a deflection is further evidence of this government’s contempt for progressive social issues. They have cravenly manipulated the intense feeling of pride held by many who live in this country over the great successes of hard-working, talented athletes; they have instrumentalised the supposed sanctity of the national anthem; and they have trivialised gender issues as a means to deflect attention from a budget that appears at first to be business as usual, but which I am sure, upon further inspection, will yield further damages for people, and further gains for corporate Canada. For me, this shows ultimate disrespect for each of these important issues. In addition to playing classic divisive politics (they are ignoring people affected by the many other problematic issues in the anthem’s lyrics), it seems to me a typically chauvinistic approach to suggest that issues affecting women could be addressed by paying attention to “aesthetics” rather than to material concerns.

* thanks to Valérie Savard for bringing up this point.

** interestingly, this is probably one of the only times we’ll see debate over grammar occupy a front and centre position in the mainstream media!

Blame the All powerful Left!

Whatever problems the Democratic Party has, kowtowing to the left is not one of them

Glenn Greenwald

Jan. 20, 2010 |

(updated below - Update II)

I have a contribution this morning to the New York Times examining the Scott Brown victory, and I’ll post the link to it once it’s up.  But for the moment, I want to address two equally moronic themes emerging over the last couple of days which seek to blame the omnipotent, dominant, super-human “Left” for the Democrats’ woes — one coming from right-wing Democrats and the other from hard-core Obama loyalists (those two categories are not mutually exclusive but, rather, often overlap).

Last night, Evan Bayh blamed the Democrats’ problems on “the furthest left elements,” which he claims dominates the Democratic Party — seriously.  And in one of the dumbest and most dishonest Op-Eds ever written, Lanny Davis echoes that claim in The Wall St. Journal:  ”Blame the Left for Massachusetts” (Davis attributes the unpopularity of health care reform to the “liberal” public option and mandate; he apparently doesn’t know that the health care bill has no public option [someone should tell him], that the public option was one of the most popular provisions in the various proposals, and the “mandate” is there to please the insurance industry, not “the Left,” which, in the absence of a public option, hates the mandate; Davis’ claim that “candidate Obama’s health-care proposal did not include a public option” is nothing short of an outright lie).

In what universe must someone be living to believe that the Democratic Party is controlled by “the Left,” let alone “the furthest left elements” of the Party?  As Ezra Klein says, the Left “ha[s] gotten exactly nothing they wanted in recent months.”  The Left wanted a single-payer system, then settled for a public option, then an opt-out public option, then Medicare expansion — only to get none of it, instead being handed a bill that forces every American to buy health insurance from the private insurance industry.  Nor was it “the Left” — but rather corporatist Democrats like Evan Bayh and Lanny Davis — who cheered for the hated Wall Street bailout; blocked drug re-importation; are stopping genuine reform of the financial industry; prevented a larger stimulus package to lower unemployment; refuse to allow programs to help Americans with foreclosures; supported escalation in Afghanistan (twice); and favor the same Bush/Cheney terrorism policies of indefinite detention, military commissions, and state secrets.

The very idea that an administration run by Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel and staffed with centrists, Wall Street mavens, and former Bush officials — and a Congress beholden to Blue Dogs and Lieberdems — has been captive “to the Left” is so patently false that everyone should be too embarrassed to utter it.  For better or worse, the Democratic strategy has long been and still is to steer clear of their leftist base and instead govern as “pragmatists” and centrists — which means keeping the permanent Washington factions pleased.  That strategy may or not be politically shrewd, but it is just a fact that the dreaded ”Left” has gotten very little of what it wanted the entire year.  Is there anyone who actually believes that “The Left” is in control of anything, let alone the Democratic Party?  The fact that Lanny Davis — to prove the Left’s dominance — has to cite one provision that was jettisoned (the public option) and another which the Left hates (the mandate) reflects how false that claim is.  What are all of the Far Left policies the Democrats have been enacting and Obama has been advocating?  I’d honestly love to know.

(more…)

As if we needed any more evidence of the mounting failure of American politics, the five right-wing justices on the supreme court have decided to open the political process to even more corporate influence.

From the New York Times:

January 22, 2010

Justices Overturn Key Campaign Limits

By ADAM LIPTAK

WASHINGTON — Sweeping aside a century-old understanding and overruling two important precedents, a bitterly divided Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections.

The ruling was a vindication, the majority said, of the First Amendment’s most basic free speech principle — that the government has no business regulating political speech. The dissenters said allowing corporate money to flood the political marketplace will corrupt democracy.

The 5-to-4 decision was a doctrinal earthquake but also a political and practical one. Specialists in campaign finance law said they expected the decision, which also applies to labor unions and other organizations, to reshape the way elections are conducted.

“If the First Amendment has any force,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority, which included the four members of its conservative wing, “it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.”

Justice John Paul Stevens read a long dissent from the bench. He said the majority had committed a grave error in treating corporate speech the same as that of human beings. His decision was joined by the other three members of the court’s liberal wing.

The case had unlikely origins. It involved a documentary called “Hillary: The Movie,” a 90-minute stew of caustic political commentary and advocacy journalism. It was produced by Citizens United, a conservative nonprofit corporation, and was released during the Democratic presidential primaries in 2008.

Citizens United lost a suit that year against the Federal Election Commission, and scuttled plans to show the film on a cable video-on-demand service and to broadcast television advertisements for it. But the film was shown in theaters in six cities, and it remains available on DVD and the Internet.

The lower court said the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, usually called the McCain-Feingold law, prohibited the planned broadcasts. The law bans the broadcast, cable or satellite transmission of “electioneering communications” paid for by corporations in the 30 days before a presidential primary and in the 60 days before the general election. That leaves out old technologies, like newspapers, and new ones, like YouTube.

The law, as narrowed by a 2007 Supreme Court decision, applies to communications “susceptible to no reasonable interpretation other than as an appeal to vote for or against a specific candidate.” It also requires spoken and written disclaimers in the film and advertisements for it, along with the disclosure of contributors’ names.

The lower court said the film was a prohibited electioneering communication with one purpose: “to inform the electorate that Senator Clinton is unfit for office, that the United States would be a dangerous place in a President Hillary Clinton world and that viewers should vote against her.”

The McCain-Feingold law does contain an exception for broadcast news reports, commentaries and editorials.

When the case was first argued last March, it seemed a curiosity likely to be decided on narrow grounds. The court could have ruled that Citizens United was not the sort of group to which the McCain-Feingold law was meant to apply, or that the law did not mean to address 90-minute documentaries, or that video-on-demand technologies were not regulated by the law. Thursday’s decision rejected those alternatives.

Instead of deciding the case in June, the court set down the case for a rare re-argument in September. It now asked the parties to address the much more consequential question of whether the court should overrule a 1990 decision, Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, which upheld restrictions on corporate spending to support or oppose political candidates, along with part of McConnell v. Federal Election Commission, the 2003 decision that upheld the central provisions of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law.

On Thursday, the court answered its own questions with a resounding yes.

As the second decade of the twenty-first century begins, we find ourselves at one of those relatively rare moments in history when major power shifts become visible to all.  If the first decade of the century witnessed profound changes, the world of 2009 nonetheless looked at least somewhat like the world of 1999 in certain fundamental respects:  the United States remained the world’s paramount military power, the dollar remained the world’s dominant currency, and NATO remained its foremost military alliance, to name just three.

By the end of the second decade of this century, however, our world is likely to have a genuinely different look to it.  Momentous shifts in global power relations and a changing of the imperial guard, just now becoming apparent, will be far more pronounced by 2020 as new actors, new trends, new concerns, and new institutions dominate the global space.  Nonetheless, all of this is the norm of history, no matter how dramatic it may seem to us.

(more…)

Preface

In the opening pages of Commonwealth Hardt and Negri claim that the book represents an attempt to “articulate an ethical project, an ethics of democratic political action within and against Empire” (vii). Reiterating their position in Empire and Multitude, they argue that despite the insecurities, conflicts, and contradictions wrought by globalization there is no longer any space “outside” the new global capitalist order. For better or worse, globalization has created a common world. Because there is no longer an outside, creating more sustainable and democratic futures requires acting in this world through new collective projects of self-rule and political invention. CW thus represents Hardt and Negri’s attempt to fully articulate the conditions of possibility for a global democracy of the multitude. Central to CW is the conceptual deployment of the common. By the common Hardt and Nergi refer to the material world as well as to the results of social production—ideas, knowledge, images, and affects. While neoliberal forms of rule have led to the further enclosure of the commons through new strategies of capital accumulation and privatization, Hardt and Negri assert that globalization has also created common spaces and modes of knowledge particularly in the realm of digital communication and cultural production. According to Hardt and Negri, these articulations of the common—while still captured within empire’s distinct alignments of biopolitical production—represent an immanent potentiality for realizing an alternative democratic project: the “becoming-Prince of the multitude”.

(more…)

Public schooling is now so thoroughly stratified that parents are searching for any available edge in gaining admission to their “school of choice”. I saw this article today in the New York Times. Essentially, test prep companies are capitalizing on parental anxiety by offering test prep courses for 3 and 4 year olds designed to help them boost their cache for prospective kindergarten admissions committees.

Test preparation has long been a big business catering to students taking SATs and admissions exams for law, medical and other graduate schools. But the new clientele is quite a bit younger: 3- and 4-year-olds whose parents hope that a little assistance — costing upward of $1,000 for several sessions — will help them win coveted spots in the city’s gifted and talented public kindergarten classes.

Motivated by a recession putting private schools out of reach and concern about the state of regular public education, parents — some wealthy, some not — are signing up at companies like Bright Kids NYC. Bright Kids, which opened this spring in the financial district, has some 200 students receiving tutoring, most of them for the gifted exams, for up to $145 a session and 80 children on a waiting list for a weekend “boot camp” program.

These types of businesses have popped up around the country, but took off in New York City when it made the Otis-Lennon School Ability Test, or Olsat, a reasoning exam, and the Bracken School Readiness Assessment, a knowledge test, the universal tests for gifted admissions beginning in 2008.

This is the introduction to a book chapter I was working on. I ended up ditching it and doing something else. I might come back it at a later time.

Contemporary life is punctuated by a variety of seemingly interminable forms of insecurity. Economic instability, proliferating anxieties over the self and the Other, eroded social safety nets, permanent war, and a looming environmental apocalypse all mark an encroaching political-economy of risk and uncertainty. To borrow a well-worn neologism from Ulrich Beck, we increasingly inhabit a “risk society” marked by an ever expanding constellation of ontological fears both real and imagined. In turn, new insecurities give way to new geographies and technologies of risk management and social control from the high-tech fortification of domestic life to the heightened policing of public spaces, institutions, and marginalized populations. In an atomized political culture dominated by commercial concerns and values, shared public responsibility for security collapses into private, corporate-led technocratic solutions and expanded law enforcement powers. The central danger born from this cycle of risk and control is the suffocating pressure it exerts on the critical and imaginative resources necessary to question and thereby collectively address the underlying systemic causes of human insecurity and suffering.

This climate of expediency and fear has enabled a culture of control to take root in public education. In recent years, school systems across the United States have turned to the corporate and criminal justice sectors in order to ostensibly make schools “safe”. This has meant the adoption of new risk management strategies and enormous outlays of public capital on CCTV cameras, ID card systems, metal detectors, biometric scanners, drug and weapons sweeps, armed security police, zero tolerance policies, and lock-down procedures. To get a sense of scale, today, 79% of all US school districts are now wired with surveillance cameras, with many cameras, such as in the Chicago Public Schools, directly monitored from police stations. Since the year 2000, the Department of Justice Office of Community Oriented Policing Service (‘COPS’) has freed up as much as $350 million dollars annually to place armed police in schools. The New York City Public Schools now have more police patrolling the halls than the total number of officers in the Boston Police Department. These trends represent an unprecedented incursion of state power into public schools precisely at a time when commitments to equitable distributions in resources are being eclipsed by attempts to restructure education through market reforms and corporate governing strategies.

School securitization is generally presented as a politically neutral and/or inevitable response to various imminent threats. However, the securitization of educational environments needs to be understood as symptomatic of a shift away from the material and ethical referents of social democracy and toward the austere mechanisms of the corporate state. This is marked by rampant commercialization/privatization, public disinvestment, the precaritization of work, and the expansion of economic and sociopolitical inequalities. As David Garland has observed, the “insecure character of today’s social and economic circumstances becomes the social surface that gives rise to our newly emphatic, overreaching concern with control and to the urgency with which we segregate, fortify, and exclude.” This intensive desire for control extends into public education through pervasive insecurities over youth. On the one hand, the securitization of education is presented as necessary to protect children from various perils. In this narrative, youth are imagined as under siege predominately from dangerous “Others”: terrorists, pedophiles, pandemic viruses, and criminals. Here, school securitization provides a means to assuage the anxieties of parents and to fulfill the needs of policy makers for “order, efficiency, and predictability in an increasingly complex, scary, and fragmented social world.” On the other hand, in the corporate media, television, and films, youth, particularly working class and minority youth, are often presented as morally corrupt and predatory. These “folk devils” of popular imagination work to legitimate “enhanced” practices of discipline and punishment in schools as well as the suspension of civil rights for youth.

Seizing on these trends is a corporate security industry – currently one of the fastest growing commercial sectors in the US. Education has become a particularly hot market for security firms as school orders now frequently outstrip sales to prisons and airports. According to Jim Dodrei of Texas based Garret Metal Detectors,

we never dreamed there would be markets in schools. Now its the largest-selling segment of our business…three or four years ago we would hear parents saying, ‘We do not want metal detectors. It looks like a prison’ now they are demanding a safe environment.

Clamoring for more “safety”, parents, administrators, and politicians have come to increasingly rely on the corporate sector/media for defining and providing the “expert” knowledge and technology of school security. Christopher Robbins has recently written that as “safety is reified as a commodity, schools can never have enough safety.” Within a rush to the corporate sphere, educational environments are only thought to be made “safe” after the “security industry organizes the visual field…in ways that permit a persistent redefinition of what “safer” means, what devices promote the next level of safety, and who is seen as a threat.” Within neoliberal culture, school “safety” comes to signal a material and immaterial process of affective labor: a making “safe” for the consumption of security commodities and the securitization of schools and youth.

The corporate media and private security industry consistently mobilize fear in order to promote an agenda of securitization in public education. In particular, narratives of “child protection” and “child demonization” have come to define the school safety debate. This chapter explores the tensions within this discursive framing particularly as it reveals a symbiosis between commercialization and various embodied and sociopolitical states of exceptionality. I suggest that this has three primary consequences: (1) it enriches and empowers the security and law enforcement industry at the expense of the public (2) it obscures forms of structural violence which create and sustain insecurities in the educational system and in the lives of youth more broadly; (3) lastly, it normalizes a culture of risk and control in public education which delimits the conditions of possibility for conceiving security within social rather than militaristic terms. What is crucially needed is a reconnection of risk and security to questions of public responsibility, investment, and justice. Ultimately, a new ethics of safety must be cultivated through substantive commitments to social advancement, human agency, and equity.

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”.

Bob Herbert’s column in the New York Times this morning extends some of my thoughts from yesterday. First, Herbert discusses how the “reform” bill promises to line the pockets of the insurance companies on the public’s dime:

It’s never a contest when the interests of big business are pitted against the public interest. So if we manage to get health care “reform” this time around it will be the kind of reform that benefits the very people who have given us a failed system, and thus made reform so necessary.

Forget about a crackdown on price-gouging drug companies and predatory insurance firms. That’s not happening. With the public pretty well confused about what is going on, we’re headed — at best — toward changes that will result in a lot more people getting covered, but that will not control exploding health care costs and will leave industry leaders feeling like they’ve hit the jackpot.

Insurance companies are delighted with the way “reform” is unfolding. Think of it: The government is planning to require most uninsured Americans to buy health coverage. Millions of young and healthy individuals will be herded into the industry’s welcoming arms. This is the population the insurers drool over.

Second, Herbert discusses the deals that have already been cut by the Obama administration with big pharma:

And then there are the drug companies. A couple of months ago the Obama administration made a secret and extremely troubling deal with the drug industry’s lobbying arm, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. The lobby agreed to contribute $80 billion in savings over 10 years and to sponsor a multimillion-dollar ad campaign in support of health care reform.

The White House, for its part, agreed not to seek additional savings from the drug companies over those 10 years. This resulted in big grins and high fives at the drug lobby. The White House was rolled. The deal meant that the government’s ability to use its enormous purchasing power to negotiate lower drug prices was off the table.

The $80 billion in savings (in the form of discounts) would apply only to a certain category of Medicare recipients — those who fall into a gap in their drug coverage known as the doughnut hole — and only to brand-name drugs. (Drug industry lobbyists probably chuckled, knowing that some patients would switch from generic drugs to the more expensive brand names in order to get the industry-sponsored discounts.)

To get a sense of how sweet a deal this is for the drug industry, compare its offer of $8 billion in savings a year over 10 years with its annual profits of $300 billion a year. Robert Reich, who served as labor secretary in the Clinton administration, wrote that the deal struck by the Obama White House was very similar to the “deal George W. Bush struck in getting the Medicare drug benefit, and it’s proven a bonanza for the drug industry.”

Lastly, Herbert discusses how such “reform” fails in any meaningful sense to actually reform the health care system. While it would rightfully bring more Americans health care, and would not deny coverage based upon pre-existing conditions, it offers no real cost control and no real protections against the pervasive mistreatment of clients by health insurance providers. By throwing out a public option you eliminate public accountability in favor of profit logics which are utterly indifferent to providing quality care. This will only ensure the continued mediocrity of the US system which is currently ranked 19th by the World Health Organization, just ahead of Slovenia and just behind Costa-Rica. It also ensures that the public interest continues to be subordinated to the interests of the corporate class.

The evidence is mounting that the health care reform bill will not include a public option. As reported today by Democracy Now, a recent Business Week article entitled “The Health Insurers Have Already Won” suggests that the medical-industrial complex, in collusion with their anti-democratic right-wing allies, have managed to shape the health reform debate to such a degree that it is all but certain that the Obama administration and the democrats (many of whom are also owned by big pharma and health insurance corps) will cave on the public option. Here is a qoute from the article:

The carriers have succeeded in redefining the terms of the reform debate to such a degree that no matter what specifics emerge in the voluminous bill Congress may send to President Obama this fall, the insurance industry will emerge more profitable. Health reform could come with a $1 trillion price tag over the next decade, and it may complicate matters for some large employers. But insurance CEOs ought to be smiling.

As insightfully outlined by Amy Goodman at Democracy Now, this reform agenda is shaping up to be nothing more than a corporate sham and an utter disgrace to democracy. It represents an absolute indifference to the public good by both the Obama administration and the democrats. If they abandon a public option there will be nothing in place to keep the insurance companies honest and will guarantee trillions of dollars funneled directly from taxpayers into government subsidies for the health insurance companies. The abandonment of a public option will thus enable the further upward redistribution of wealth from the public to the private and is painfully indicative of the steady erosion of the American democratic project. I fear it also signals the looming failure of the Obama presidency.