Jajuna

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.

From the New York Times:

A powerful thinker, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was an avatar of “structuralism,” a school of thought in which universal “structures” were believed to underlie all human activity, giving shape to seemingly disparate cultures and creations. His work was a profound influence even on his critics, of whom there were many. There has been no comparable successor to him in France. And his writing — a mixture of the pedantic and the poetic, full of daring juxtapositions, intricate argument and elaborate metaphors — resembles little that had come before in anthropology.

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.

I had to chuckle today when I saw this column in the New York Times by David Brooks. It offers heaping praise for Obama’s $4.3 billion dollar “Race to the Top” education program. I was struck by the piece because Brooks so effortlessly refuses to question his own assumptions. Essentially, education secretary Arne Duncan and the federal government have created this fund to reward those states that most enthusiastically embrace what Brooks refers to as “real educational reform”. What this “real reform” signals is more school privatization,  union busting, voucher schemes, and standardized testing.

What really gets Brooks excited though is merit pay. I can understand why. Who doesn’t think good teachers should be rewarded for a job well done? The problem is that whenever it has been attempted historically it has been a miserable failure - breeding a toxic mix of cronyism, resentment, and animosity among teachers. For example, in the school I taught at in Chicago we had “merit pay” which basically meant whoever was “in” with the principle and administration received a bonus (for more on merit pay as well as other insights into the history of school reform see the Tyack and Cuban book “Tinkering Toward Utopia”).

According to Brooks, the integration of merit pay “will mean student performance will increasingly be a factor in how much teachers get paid and whether they keep their jobs.” And what would be the criteria for judging the value of a teacher? He states “there is no consensus on exactly how to do this, but there is clear evidence that good teachers produce consistently better student test scores.”

Test scores!

Standardized tests are nothing but a bludgeon: a malicious instrument which deadens the talent and creativity of teachers as well as the joy and curiosity of students. In other words, test scores do not, can not, stand as a measure of anything which resembles actual learning.

This quote more or less gets at the political resonance of all this:

“I’ve been deeply disturbed by a lot that’s going on in Washington,” Jeb Bush said on Thursday, “but this is not one of them. President Obama has been supporting a reform secretary, and this is deserving of Republican support.”

The republicans love Arne Duncan and his version of “reform” because it continues the trend set by the Bush administration to treat education as an adjunct of the corporate state. This means more teaching to the test, more punitive accountability schemes, and the perpetuation of corporate managerial frameworks, economic values, workforce discipline, and business interests - not too mention opening the public education sector to huge profits. For an account of what is deeply wrong with this agenda check out this article by Mark Slouka in Harper’s Magazine. It is a deeply prescient critique of the current corporate led regime of school reform and a brilliant defense of the liberal democratic tradition in public education. This quote is emblematic:

What is taught, at any given time, in any culture, is an expression of what that culture considers important. That much seems undebatable. How “the culture” decides, precisely, on what matters, how openly the debate unfolds—who frames the terms, declares a winner, and signs the check—well, that’s a different matter. Real debate can be short-circuited by orthodoxy, and whether that orthodoxy is enforced through the barrel of a gun or backed by the power of unexamined assumption, the effect is the same.

In our time, orthodoxy is economic. Popular culture fetishizes it, our entertainments salaam to it (how many millions for sinking that putt, accepting that trade?), our artists are ranked by and revered for it. There is no institution wholly apart. Everything submits; everything must, sooner or later, pay fealty to the market; thus cost-benefit analyses on raising children, on cancer medications, on clean water, on the survival of species, including—in the last, last analysis—our own. If humanity has suffered under a more impoverishing delusion, I’m not aware of it.

That education policy reflects the zeitgeist shouldn’t surprise us; capitalism has a wonderful knack for marginalizing (or co-opting) systems of value that might pose an alternative to its own. Still, capitalism’s success in this case is particularly elegant: by bringing education to heel, by forcing it to meet its criteria for “success,” the market is well on the way to controlling a majority share of the one business that might offer a competing product, that might question its assumptions. It’s a neat trick. The problem, of course, is that by its success we are made vulnerable. By downsizing what is most dangerous (and most essential) about our education, namely the deep civic function of the arts and the humanities, we’re well on the way to producing a nation of employees, not citizens. Thus is the world made safe for commerce, but not safe.

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.

It has been a long time since I have posted. This is because I have been crazy-busy writing and delivering conference papers (three in the last two weeks) and trying as I can to organize and write my PhD exam and dissertation proposal (a terrifically masochistic endeavor indeed!). Below is something I came across in my files today as I was writing a section for my comps exam which critiques Foucault’s use of biopower, particularly its Eurocentric orientation. I wrote this awhile ago in response to Ann Stoler’s critique of Foucauldian biopower, which she expands to include the reciprocal relations between European identity and colonialism.

In Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (1995) Ann Stoler takes up Michel Foucault’s theoretical propositions in his A History of Sexuality Vol 1 and “refigures” them in a wider imperial field in order to link discourses of sexuality and the production of bourgeoisie subjectivity to race, and specifically to “racial thinking”. Thinking is a crucial word for it means that race must not only be confronted within an epistemological framework (how we know) but also within the ontological (what we know). Race is confounding in the sense that it blurs the material and symbolic lines of the visible and the invisible as well as the known and the unknown. I would like to briefly situate Stoler’s notion of “racial thinking” within this field of the thought and the un-thought and the visible and the invisible. By insisting that “racial thinking” was, and is, intrinsic to the production and circulation of discourses surrounding sexuality, Stoler is able to situate race as a fundamental category in the construction of not only what and how we know, but also who we are.

Stoler argues that the colonial “order of things” hinged upon the development of biopolitical technologies that enabled, albeit in an obvious asymmetry of violence, the efficient management of the colonizer and colonized alike, and bound them through mutually constitutive networks of material and affective relations. Intimately linked with the biopolitics of colonialism were discourses of sexuality which were interwoven with the subjectivization of colonial bodies: their study, classification, and manipulation in the interest of maximizing the rationality of the colonial endeavor. Discourses surrounding the racialized and sexualized bodies of the colonized were intrinsically tied to the production of bourgeoisie subjects. She claims that widely circulating notions of the racialized colonial “Other” served as “racially erotic counterpoints” which contrapuntally coded the terrain of European morality, health, and desire. Stoler argues that by failing to incorporate this expanded field of knowledge/power Foucault’s History of Sexuality misses a crucial axis in the production of European sexuality as well as the fundamental role of racial imaginaries in the historical modifications and developments of regulatory and normalizing techniques of rule. She asks, “was the obsessive search for “truth about sex” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries directly culled from earlier confessional models, as Foucault claims, or was this “truth about sex” recast around the invention of other truth claims, specifically those working through the language of race?”

According to Stoler, although Foucault understood that race underwrote the operation of power in the modern liberal (biopolitical) state, he failed to address how the material and symbolic exchange between metropole and colony produced mutually constitutive regimes of truth. Foucault restricted his analysis of race to a category of biopolitical regulation. In other words, he describes race as a “mechanism which allows biopower to work”, or, a category from which the vital capacity and health of bodies is regulated and managed in space and time. Stoler doesn’t feel like such a description goes nearly far enough in grappling with the way race is active within the constitution of modernity as it developed in out of the discourses and practices of imperialism. In this sense Stoler is making the claim that race is not only a “technique of power” but is a fundamental category underwriting the development the liberal state, its subjects, and the logics and rules governing and binding them together. By situating Foucault’s frame within this expanded field of power, Stoler argues that race functions as a grammar underlying the interstices of thought and experience within the construction of European and non European identities. This insistence deepens Foucault’s descriptions of biopower and complicates the field of thought and visibility. It claims that biopower is not only underwritten by the application of racial violence in the interest of maximizing the productive capacities of populations, but also predicated on racial thinking within the inter-subjective mediation of self and other. It involves the way ideas concerning difference are folded into thought and action as well as the processes of self governing and collective regulation. In this formulation, thinking is regulated by racial grammars which mediate the “relationship between visible characteristics and invisible properties, outer form and inner essence”…and the “untraceable identity markers” that negotiate what is possible to know and not to know, between what we see and do not see, and what we think and do not think.

Currently, there is an article at The Nation  by Barbara Ehrenreich and Bill Fletcher  that questions the viability of a socialist alternative to capitalism at the present juncture. Following this, are a series of responses by Tariq Ali, Immanuel Wallerstein, Bill Mckibbon, and Rebcca Solnit, who each add their two-cents on possibilities for what such a movement could and should look like.

There is little disagreement among the contributers that neoliberal capitalism represents a dead-end for short and long term social and economic sustainability. They cite many of the utterly dire environmental projections we have become accustumed to hearing. As an example, I saw last week that scientists predict an entire collapse of the planet’s ocean life by 2048. I dont think that we are well equiped to understand what such a catastrophe might actually mean for ecological and human life. The contributors also offer various critiques of late capitalism. None forsee its chastening within the current crisis. The various technocratic realignments we are witnessing, while perhaps offering a bit more regulatory sanity, do not address the long term problems and consequences of an endless-growth political economy.       

On the question of developing alternative democratic futures, the contributors are slightly less certain. For Ehrenreich and Fletcher, a more sustainable and equitable blueprint for democratic life will only and can only come from mass social movements. Their’s is a revolutionary mobilization premised on a radical democratic model for power sharing which can ensure civil liberties while co-ordinating various types of social exchange - ala Michael Alperts’ “parecon” model. Mckibbon, Wallerstein, and Ali suggest that the global north has much to learn from Latin America concerning strategic opposition and sustainable movements. Wallerstein suggests three tasks for the left:

1. Promote intellectual clarity about the fundamental choice. Then organize at a thousand levels and in a thousand ways to push things in the right direction. The primary thing to do is to encourage the decommodification of as much as we can decommodify.

2. The second is to experiment with all kinds of new structures that make better sense in terms of global justice and ecological sanity.

3. And the third thing we must do is to encourage sober optimism.

Below, I have included Rebcca Solnit’s response in full. I do so because I think she offers a sense of how these tasks are already being put into practice at a number of scales and contexts. She also insightfully articulates the fundamental tension within these democratic projects: How are we to think about balancing community determination with the neccessity of larger regulatory structures? Her comments rightly point out that older models of state socialism are as undesirable as neoliberalism. She suggests that there are a multitude of examples of locally-based social movements that are pursuing sustainable projects beyond the state and outside the market. The question remains, can such a networked anti-hierarchical schema negotiate the neccessary structural authority to maintain coherence and to ensure sustainability, liberty, and equity?

Here is Solnit’s response in full:

Barbara Ehrenreich and Bill Fletcher write mournfully that there was supposed to be a revolution–but there was and is a revolution, just not one that looks the way socialists and a lot of ’60s radicals imagined it. The Sandinista revolution thirty years ago may well have been the last of its kind. The revolutions that have mattered since have been less interested in seizing and becoming the state than circumventing it to go straight to becoming other people doing other things without state permission. The fifteen-year-old Zapatista revolution, which never sought state power and (though badgered constantly) was never defeated, is the revolution for our times, or really only the most dramatic of countless thousands involving Native Americans and Indian farmers and South African cooperatives and Argentinian workplaces and European utopian communities.

In the United States the most obvious realm in which this has transpired is food and farming. Organic, urban, community-assisted and guerrilla agriculture are still small parts of the picture, but effective ones–a revolt against what transnational corporate food and capitalism generally produce. This revolt is taking place in the vast open space of Detroit, in the inner-city farms of West Oakland, in the victory gardens and public-housing of Alemany Farm in San Francisco, in Growing Power in Milwaukee and many other places around the country. These are blows against alienation, poor health, hunger and other woes fought with shovels and seeds, not guns. At its best, tending one’s garden leads to tending one’s community and policy, and ultimately becomes a way of entering the public sphere rather than withdrawing from it.

“Do we have a plan, people?” Ehrenreich and Fletcher ask. We have thousands of them, being carried out quite spectacularly over the past few decades, for gardens and childcare co-ops and bicycle lanes and farmers’ markets and countless ways of doing things differently and better. The underlying vision is neither state socialist nor corporate capitalist, but something humane, local and accountable–anarchist, basically, as in direct democracy. The revolution exists in little bits everywhere, but not much has been done to connect its dots. We need to say that there are alternatives being realized all around us and theorize the underlying ideals and possibilities. But we need to start from the confidence that the revolution has been with us for a while and is succeeding in bits and pieces. Enlarged and clarified, it could answer a lot of the urgent needs the depression brings.

If anarchists and neoliberals had one thing in common, it was an interest in shrinking the state that socialists hoped would solve things. Right now nothing but that state exists on a scale to drag us back out of what the corporations and international markets dragged us into, but one of the questions for the long term is about scale. Small isn’t always beautiful, but big beyond accountability or comprehension got crazy as well as ugly.

I just took another spin through Jacques Rancière’s  “The Politics of Aesthetics” and have been trying to puzzle through the relationship it sets up between art and politics. The book is a relatively brisk read, as it is really nothing more than a series of brief responses by Ranciere to questions posed by editor Gabriel Rockhill. However, I still find it quite difficult to begin a discussion of Ranciere’s philosophy as it is constructed out of a loose arrangement of inter-implicated concepts. As one engages a particular concept within the arrangement, the pull of the remaining conceptual network becomes immediately apparent. This arrangement and interplay of concepts mirrors the theory of aesthetics (and sociality) that Rancière puts forth. I don’t think that it is any accident that this text ends on a meditation concerning the aesthetics of theoretical writing. He states “a theoretical discourse is always an aesthetic form, a sensible reconfiguration of the fact it is arguing about”. The next line and last sentence of the book reads: “Here we come back to our beginning” (66).The beginning to which Rancière refers is indeed his initial discussion of aesthetics within the first few pages of the text, thus he offers a performative gesture of the theory which he constructs throughout the work.

The poetic form of Rancière’s text, however, does not necessarily confer upon it a political character. Rancière contends that while aesthetics are inherent to any form of politics, politics are a rare occurrence. This is one of the significant distinctions between Rancière and other theorists of his generation such as Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. While sharing much in common with these thinkers particularly in his critique of representational thinking, Rancière situates politics as singular moments of possibility rather than as intrinsic to everyday relations of power. This means that while aesthetic works (art) may always contain the potential to become political, this does not mean that art and politics share a determined relationship.

As we discover throughout the book “art and politics are contingent notions” (51). Art is the work attributed to ways of “doing and making” within what Rancière refers to as the “distribution of the sensible”. This partition of the sensible describes what presents itself to sense experience: the fields of visibility and sayability which form both what is common and discrete within a community. It constitutes then, the aesthetic frames by which bodies, statements, and shares are arranged within unequal, yet consensual alignments of recognition. While art is inherent to this aesthetic distribution, this does not casually affix political value to works of art. It does, however, indicate that politics contains an inherent aesthetic and artistic valence.

Politics for Rancière occur only when an element (individual, group, statement, image, speech act) is able to disrupt the distribution of perception and, in turn, reconfigure it through its very emergence. This disruptive act, or dissensus, as Rancière refers to it, turns on a particular principle. By rejecting a “science of the hidden”, the search for meaning behind the surface of appearances, Rancière negates the possibility for a privileged position of mastery over knowledge. “Where one searches for the hidden beneath the apparent, a position of mastery is established. I have tried to conceive of a topography that does not presuppose this position of mastery” (p.49). On this topography outside mastery, which Rancière situates as historically contingent systems of possibilities, relations of interpretation and meaning-making become, in theory, available equally to all. This vision of equality stands as an undetermined universal presupposition. The act of politics occurs when this universal is pressed into service in a singularized form, when a group or an individual with a lesser standing in the social order disrupts the distribution of the sensible, and thus gives form and content to their fundamental equality within the social order.

While this vision of dissensus signals the aesthetic and artistic within the political, it denies any political determinacy to artistic and or aesthetic practices. The problem is that there is an “undecidable” element to art. This is to say that its effects within given frameworks of experience cannot be mapped onto stable forms of meaning. This makes putting art into the service of politics highly precarious. Rancière states that “the dream of a suitable political work of art is in fact the dream of disrupting the relationship between the visible, the sayable, and the thinkable without having to use the terms of a message as a vehicle” (63). This sets up an aporia for political art. As Rancière would reject art with a “message” that is to evoke proscribed responses, he insists that art must translate meaning through its ruptural potential in such a way that does not altogether eliminate the legibility of political meaning. He states that this entails a process of negotiation. “Suitable political art, at one and the same time, would ensure a double effect: the readability of a political signification and a sensible or perceptual shock caused, conversely, by the uncanny, by that which resists signification” (63). Political art negotiates this double effect at its own peril. While the readability of the message threatens to undue arts affective force, this force simultaneously places its political meaning into doubt. Such is the challenge to art and politics that Rancière offers, and which he attempts to navigate within his philosophy and writing.