Identity now functions not so much to retain a representational space or define a trajectory toward cultural autonomy as it operates as a holograph of what the appropriate subject of a new form of governance might look like. The referents of identities are now less important than the capacity to look like an identity at all.
—Cindy Patton, “Tremble, Hetero Swine!”
It may be that the true predicaments of our time will assume their authentic form . . . only when totalitarianism has become a thing of the past.
—Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
This book asks how the political identity and the domain of civic practice we call “citizenship” are transformed, eroded, or, perhaps, disappeared in the contexts of neoliberal governance. To put the question more pointedly: What happens—what is presently happening—to the meaning and practice of citizenship with the eclipse of popular sovereignty? By way of caveat lector, I confess at the outset that this opening chapter pursues a rather eclectic trajectory through a limited body of historical and critical work that has launched and compelled my own thinking on this question. My concern is not so much that in our rush to think the emergent modalities of state and corporate power routinely glossed as “neoliberal,” we neglect the topic of political subject-constitution (though sometimes, of course, we do that, as well), but rather that when we do attend to latter-day “citizen-subjects,” we proceed as though we know what we mean—as though the term “citizen,” divested of the modifier “bourgeois,” perhaps with an alternate descriptor attached (such as “flexible” or “entrepreneurial”), can name the relation of subjects to the institutions of neoliberal governance as well as it did, not so very long ago, to the legal and civic institutions of the bourgeois nation-state. In this regard, it is only too apparent that the “we” of the preceding sentence is no ingenuous rhetorical choice, as my own title brashly enacts the very same critical maneuver. At the same time, my aspiration is to hold open the question of whether “citizens” and “citizenship” outlive their modern conditions of possibility and, especially, the related question of what claims we can make for (and about) them––whether our intellectual reflexes, honed on the critique of the “old” citizenship and its contexts (abstract equality, racial nationalism, bourgeois civil society, and so forth) are adequate to the critical engagement with whatever it is we now name citizenship, what Michael Hardt expressly calls “the citizen as a whatever identity” (1992, 40).
My tactic in this chapter is to retrace a path across ground habitually mapped by reference to such watchwords as “governmentality,” “flexibility,” “deterritorialization,” “networks,” and “control” in order to apprehend it incompletely, that is, to encounter the elementary contours of the present as they retain the capacity to startle and elude. Along the way, I will suggest that one of the more confounding implications of what we might call, variously and to somewhat different effects, “governmentalized state power,” the “society of control,” “neoliberal governance,” or the “network society” is the diminishing critical value of the very tactic of defamiliarization on which this chapter therefore relies. Critique as a mode of defamiliarization or estrangement assumes that power operates to fix social and political relations and to suture individuals and collectives to what will therefore appear—if the “fix” holds—as the natural or given contours of their identities, communities, nations, or worlds. On this model, power sustains itself by producing a readable social and political world, one that appears coherent, insofar as it adheres to the laws and the norms in which its readers are already interpellated and so the defining aspiration of critique is to unmake this readable world, to reveal its incoherencies, contradictions, and the bad faith that governs its composition. None of us may see the nuance of our critical practice rendered in this admittedly reductive sketch, but in its general outlines, nonetheless, this understanding of critique certainly reflects my own intellectual formation, and in this, no doubt, I am not alone.
Insofar as critical practice is permeated by this assumption that established political power inevitably binds its subjects to a naturalized or normalized social order, we bind ourselves to a fundamentally dehistoricized, inert conception of the state, even as we cite our deep commitment to tracing its historical permutations. Instead, we might interrogate the abiding value and the limits of critical defamiliarization if what confronts us under the sign of “neoliberalism” today are “ultrarapid forms of free-floating control” and dereferentialized identities that remain constitutively—rigorously—mutable or unmade (Deleuze 1990, 1). It is this doubled attention, to matters of governance and citizenship, on the one hand, and to the limits of critical practice, on the other, that compels this chapter’s eclectic circuits through scholarship not always or primarily concerned with “neoliberalism,” including Hannah Arendt’s germinal study of totalitarianism, a practice of power she understands as particularly unresponsive to established modes of critical apprehension, by reason of its systematically denormalizing and derealizing effects. Predictably enough, my preoccupation with the question of (neo)citizenship has drawn me (anew) to the essential critical work on neoliberalism, understood as a form of state-sponsored, publically subsidized market “freedom” (Harvey 2005; Henwood 1998) and thus a political rather than narrowly economic rationality (Brown 2005), supporting a new and seemingly unabating round of primitive accumulation (Prashad 2003), or accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 2005), and signaled in the massive recalibration of public and private domains, including the privatizing of state functions (Klein 2007) and the distribution of functions formally assigned to “government” across proliferating, non-state agencies of “governance” (Brown 2005; Ong 2006). Less predictably, it has also led me somewhat afield of these discussions, to a consideration of neoliberalism in its relation to normative culture, by which I mean, loosely, the ensemble of discourses, media, institutions, and customary practices that performs the work of social reproduction and arrays us as readers of a readable world. I find a spur to this other line of reflection in Foucault’s Collège de France lectures, those that attend not just to neoliberalism explicitly, but to the wider arc of inquiry on government, “governmentality,” sovereignty, and discipline that spans the years from 1975 to 1979. Foucault’s work on “biopolitics” and “governmentality” (both his own neologisms) have been galvanizing for much of the scholarship on neoliberalism, of course, though little attention has been paid to what I read in the lectures as a kind of loose speculative thread on the contemporary, “neoliberal” (dis)articulations of “governmentality,” discipline, and normalization.
Thus I begin retrospectively by revisiting modern citizenship as forged in and through the alignment of governmentality (regulating populations) and discipline (norming individuals), precisely so as to track and to throw into relief how neoliberal governance, in Foucault’s elaboration, entails the ascendance of the former and the waning of the latter—in effect, the uncoupling of the state’s historically twinned aspirations to administer human life and individual consciousness. What are the implications for a contemporary neocitizenship, imagined on these terms, as something other than a disciplined category of political subjectivity? This question leads me to address the current, largely celebratory emphasis on civil society, generally assumed (by those who study the nonprofit sector) to represent a thriving arena of civic activity, operating independently of the neoliberal state. I pressure the insistence on the (supposed) autonomy of civil society actors (untethered, as the argument goes, from both markets and states) in order to ask what forms and relays of political activity this conception of a discrete civic sector implies and enables. I suggest that the contemporary flowering of civil society corresponds to the eclipse of normative political cultures and the emergence of the citizen as a kind of hologram or simulacrum. Ultimately, I broach a question that reverberates through every chapter of this study: namely, how we imagine resistance to the intentions of a neoliberal state no longer invested in (or dependent on) the production of conviction or consent.
In the wake of a heated debate in the early to mid-1990s on “the decline of the nation-state,” to cite Masao Miyoshi’s much contested thesis, it has become commonplace to suggest that the relation of nation and nationalism to state formation is in the process of a more or less radical reconfiguration under the political and economic conditions of neoliberalism (Miyoshi 1993). As David Harvey notes, for instance, “neoliberalization” entails a “curious relationship between state and nation. In principle, neoliberal theory does not look with favour on the nation even as it supports the idea of a strong state. The umbilical cord that tied together state and nation under embedded liberalism had to be cut if neoliberalism was to flourish” (2005, 84). In Harvey’s work and elsewhere, the bearing of neoliberalism on the nation-state form is usually something of an ancillary point, an effect that follows from the state’s dedication to the (coercive) installation of “free markets,” or the wholesale privatization of public resources. But one might also conceive a framing of neoliberalism in which the current unraveling of modern nation-state relations appears more central (a primary rather than secondary symptom). For the purpose of these reflections on citizenship, at any rate, I am inclined to think of neoliberalism as a specific resolution to the duplicity of the modern nation-state, constituted in the double imperative to advance the public good and to secure private property in its myriad and proliferating forms. Neoliberalism abdicates the former imperative in favor of the latter, and in so doing frees the state from the compulsion to realize a national-popular interest that it can claim to uphold. Paradoxically, the state’s retreat from the cultivation of a national body politic that consents to the state’s doings in its name sets the stage for a contemporary flowering of nationalist rhetoric, be it in the form of overtly particularistic ethnonationalisms emancipated from the (always fraught) universalism of modern nation-state formations, or in the form of noise, a kind of media static whose main purpose, far from commanding hearts and minds, is simply to drown out anything of critical moment that might otherwise aspire to its mass dissemination (a form endemic to the post-9/11 United States).
This uncoupling of state from nation corresponds, as well, to the decline of the sovereign state, at least insofar as sovereignty names a practice of legitimated power, contingent on the lawful constitution and deployment of the sovereign authority.1 In the case of the modern nation-state as it emerges from the needs and aspirations of an ascendant bourgeoisie, political sovereignty is formally vested in a national people, or in Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s tidy summation, “The nation became explicitly the concept that summarized the bourgeois hegemonic solution to the problem of sovereignty” (2000, 101). At stake in the neoliberal parting of the ways between state and nation, then, is a structure of legitimation that binds the power of the state to a national body politic, which it becomes the educative mission of the state to engender, in a form consistent with the dominant class interests to which the state is fundamentally beholden. The bourgeois nation-state entails the articulation of sovereignty to discipline—of the power of the prince (now the distributed power of the state and its offices) to the “soul” of the citizen-subject, such that the interpellated citizen experiences his subjection as his freedom, or in Michael Warner’s apt phrase, “consents to [his] own coercion” (1990, 111). On the other side of this historical formation, the uncoupling of state from nation that signals the eclipse of sovereign power signals, too, the erosion of disciplinary society, as the means by which the bourgeois state reforms the mob as qualified national citizenry. Conceptually speaking, at any rate, we may anticipate that neoliberalism displaces not only the nation-state synthesis, but also the particular articulation of sovereign to disciplinary power that this synthesis both provokes and enables. How readily such an analytic—wrought in the theoretical consideration of something called “the modern nation-state”—illuminates the situation of any specific (post)modern nation-state is a question about the reach of neoliberalism, the depth and speed to which it penetrates the nations and regions of the world, as well as the uneven interactions of neoliberal agents and policies with established and eroding local formations. I approach the abstractions through reflection on the contemporary United States, by which I mean not only the territorial/sovereign U.S. state, but other nations and regions partially or fully administered by U.S. government and governance agencies (by the U.S. armed forces, or State Department funding bureaus such as USAID, but also, more loosely, by the private corporations and NGOs to which state functions are increasingly outsourced). Certainly, I would argue that this dismantling of the nation-state synthesis is well advanced in the United States, as well as central to “its” aspirations elsewhere in the world.
It is rather striking that the historical transfer of sovereignty from the prince to the people, “the bourgeois hegemonic solution to the problem of sovereignty,” remains, to all appearances, a matter of relative indifference to the preeminent historian of disciplinary society. However, Foucault’s provocative, if truncated, reflections on the triangulated relations of sovereignty, discipline, and the modern “art of government” nonetheless reverberate with the problematics of a specifically national form of sovereignty. More exactly, it seems that “governmentality,” as Foucault describes it, sustains the articulation of sovereign to disciplinary power at the point of the emergence of the nation-state, even as governmentality supplants sovereignty and discipline alike in the contemporary context of the nation-state’s undoing. In his lecture of February 1, 1978, Foucault defines the art of government over and against sovereignty, even while insisting on their co-implication in (early) modern state formation; notably, the question of governmentality’s relation to discipline (to family, school, asylum, prison, to name only the most obvious disciplinary institutions) is raised rather more obliquely, towards the lecture’s end. While it is true that the sovereignty of the prince is animated at some level by a conception of the common good (even the absolute monarch cannot by right renounce obligation to the welfare of his subjects), still, Foucault observes, in every instance, the “common good” manifests precisely as obedience to the sovereign’s law—as “nothing other than submission to this law,” in short (2007, 98). By contrast,
Government is defined . . . as a right manner of arranging (disposer) things in order to lead (conduire) them, not to the form of the “common good,” as the texts of the jurists said, but to an end suitable for each of the things to be governed. This implies, first of all, a plurality of specific ends. For example, the government will have to ensure that the greatest possible amount of wealth is produced, that the people are provided with sufficient means of subsistence and that the population can increase. So, the objective of government will be a whole series of specific finalities. And one will arrange (disposer) things to achieve these different ends. . . . Whereas the end of sovereignty is internal to itself and gets its instruments from itself in the form of law, the end of government is internal to the things it directs (diriger); it is to be sought in the perfection, maximization, or intensification of the processes it directs, and the instruments of government, will become diverse tactics rather than laws. (2007, 99, my emphasis)
A sovereignty realized in the perpetuation of the sovereign’s right seems no longer fully adequate to a historical context where the sovereign is the national people, in whose name the power of the state is marshaled, but who do not, themselves, perform its offices or discharge its functions—who dwell outside the institutions of the state, in other words. For the people clad in the political lion’s skin of sovereignty, to borrow Marx’s memorable phrase, political right can never be remote from private interests—from the right disposition of things as they bear on their subsistence, health, prosperity, generation. From this perspective, the governmentalization of the state, such that “population appears as the end and instrument of government, rather than as the sovereign’s strength,” gains new momentum under the conditions of national sovereignty, which could hardly have developed without it (Foucault 2007, 105).
Foucault writes more obliquely of the relation of governmentality to discipline, although some of his remarks respecting the ends and tactics of the governmentalized state indicate the folding of disciplinary aspirations into the broader aims of “a society of government.” “Interest as the consciousness of each of the individuals making up the population, and interest as the interest of the population, whatever the individual interests and aspirations may be of those who comprise the population, will be the ambiguous fundamental target and instrument of the government of populations,” he observes (2007, 105–106). Here disciplinary practice as it cultivates and norms the interior life of the individual converges on biopolitics and its “multiform tactics” for managing populations and economies, a convergence emphasized, as well, in Foucault’s rejection of a progressivist schema, “the replacement of a society of sovereignty by a society of discipline, and then a society of discipline by a society, say, of government” (2007, 107). The development and elaboration of governmentality thus proceeds in tandem with the proliferation of disciplinary institutions and the exercise of (national) sovereignty, bound up in the juridical category of the citizen and the disciplinary production of the normative political discourses associated with the practice of citizenship. At the same time, however, Foucault also posits “the tendency, the line of force, that for a long time, and throughout the West, has constantly led toward the pre-eminence over all other types of power—sovereignty, discipline, and so on—of the type of power that we can call government” (2007, 108).
Certainly, the “pre-eminence” of governmental over sovereign power is starkly apparent in the contemporary United States, where questions concerning the rightful conduct of the state (has the state exercised its power to lawful ends, by legitimate means?) seem less and less intelligible, as compared to questions about administrative tactics (has the state attained its aims efficiently?). To mention only a single, early instance among the thick and varied evidence for this structural transformation, the Democratic Party elite steadfastly declined to pursue the impeachment of Bush administration personnel for documented crimes and in the face of public opinion polls suggesting that somewhere on the order four in ten U.S. voters favored removing the president and vice president from office.2 As a form of legal redress, impeachment (or impeachment proceedings) serves to uphold sovereign power (to legitimate the power of the office by eliminating the culpable office-holder). From this perspective, the party leadership’s refusal to pursue impeachment represented less a failure of will or even a sign of complicity in any simple sense (such as a desire that Democratic successors to the presidency enjoy the same inflation of executive powers)—though it surely represented those things, too—than a canny and tactical acquiescence in the dominance of governmental reasoning. Like other forms of procedural/legal redress to the contradictions and excesses of the nation-state, impeachment is arguably best understood as a limited strategy within a war of position. So from the standpoint of a left opposition for whom law has never been adequate to justice, the question now is not all that fundamentally different from what it has been, historically: how to envision the tactical pursuit of limited justice (only this time) within a largely extra-legal, administrative discourse that calibrates standards of “accountability” and “compliance” to the benchmarks of efficiency (output, turnover time, flexible application, and so forth). Ironically enough, under the conditions of dominant governmentality, recourse to the law and to the determination of right functions generally as it has always functioned for those on the margins or the outside of bourgeois hegemony—functions, in other words, as a tactic, and no longer a preferred or privileged tactic in a world where anyone too insistent on the constitutive and normative properties of law looks vaguely sentimental and out of touch with the real politik of the day.
But what exactly does it mean to suggest, as does Foucault, that governmentality takes “pre-eminence” over discipline? What are the contours of governmentality uncoupled from discipline? Foucault comes closest to an explicit answer in the context of discussing the governmental techniques specific to “American neoliberalism,” which he suggests suspend the value and the operations of discipline that elsewhere he terms the exercise of power “over the fine grain of individual behaviors” (2007, 66). Addressing the tactical calculations of “law enforcement” as imagined in the framework of Chicago School economics, Foucault notes that
you can see that what appears on the horizon of this kind of analysis is not at all the ideal or project of an exhaustively disciplinary society in which the legal network hemming in individuals is taken over and extended internally by, let’s say, normative mechanisms. Nor is it a society in which a mechanism of general normalization and the exclusion of those who cannot be normalized is needed. On the horizon of this analysis we see instead the image, idea, or theme-program of a society in which there is an optimization of systems of difference, in which the field is left open to fluctuating processes, in which minority individuals and practices are tolerated, in which action is brought to bear on the rules of the game, rather than on the players, and finally in which there is an environmental type of intervention instead of the internal subjugation of individuals. (2008, 259–260)
In this sketch—we might say, in this prognosis—governmentality after discipline works to regulate the kinds and conditions of labor, of education, and of social action; the movements of elite and subaltern populations; their (in)security; their access to data and commodities, including the necessities of survival. In other words, governmentality after discipline is a grammar of environment, which abdicates (as no longer necessary or functional) the vast disciplinary project of normalizing the identifications, the grammar of incorporation and abjection, which constitute the psychic life of human subjects.
Gilles Deleuze (borrowing from William Burroughs) has proposed the term “society of control” for this post-disciplinary formation, in a short essay that stresses the mass production of individuality as a defining element of disciplinary society.
We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become “dividuals” and masses, samples, data, markets, or “banks.” Perhaps it is money that expresses the distinction between the two societies best, since discipline always referred back to minted money that locks gold as numerical standard, while control relates to floating rates of exchange, modulated according to a rate established by a set of standard currencies. The old monetary mole is the animal of the space of enclosure, but the serpent is that of the societies of control. (1990, 2, emphasis in original)
Deleuze here telegraphs a series of broad claims about the paired decline of bounded (or “molded”) individuality and of the massified social body—the mass of population conceived as social organism. On the one hand, new techniques of “numeration” transform the mass into multiform, proliferating “markets” or “data.” On the other, the institutions of disciplinary society—the discrete “spaces of enclosure”—that produced “enclosed” individuals give way to strategies for the formation of constitutively incomplete, susceptible subjects, perennially open to refinements—or “modulations” of control that now traverse the social field (for example, Deleuze cites the shift from school-based education to “perpetual training,” or in the current idiom, “life-long learning”). Within this framework, the (seemingly) offhanded association of disciplinarity with the gold standard (and control with floating exchange rates) flags a dereferentialization of identity on which Cindy Patton also insists in one of the epigraphs to this chapter. If discipline aspires to fix the subject through a set of (internalized) reference points, control arrays receptive subjects, minutely sensitive to the smallest fluctuations of the market. At stake in these transformations, then, is the unraveling of normative bourgeois culture: the waning of pedagogies of internalization (induced self-surveillance); the dismantling of identity as an organic social force (one that consolidates rather than proliferates attachments). By this I understand not simply the unraveling of those norms historically specific to bourgeois sociality, but rather the erosion of normative culture as such, that is, culture oriented to the production of reproducible interiorities. At the same time, the twin assumptions it takes from the encounter with normative culture—that culture works to reproduce its categories; that internalization is the primary, disciplinary mechanism for effecting this reproduction—remain axiomatic for critique, even as we labor to devise new tropologies of the post-disciplinary subject. To announce the passing of disciplinary society is also, I suggest, to raise significant and largely unanswered questions about the aspirations of critique after normative culture, when the tactics of control through contingent valuations and deferentialized categories seem, paradoxically, to align with our prized analytical tactics for unmaking the world.
To interrogate the contours of citizenship after normative culture is necessarily to raise questions about the present, neoliberal configuration of civil society, which stands, historically, as a primary location for disciplinary institutions dedicated to the production of normative citizen-subjects. Here I linger, in particular, on an essay by Michael Hardt, which both elaborates the historical continuities between disciplinary and civil society and identifies the contemporary moment with the “withering” of this arena for social regulation. Hardt’s preoccupation thus resonates with my own, even as his assertion of civil society’s decline moves sharply against the current of a neoliberal policy discourse that asserts almost exactly the reverse. In both regards, the essay offers an exceptionally useful launching point for thinking about the operations of civil society in a post-disciplinary framework.
For Hardt, the question of disciplinary and civil society presents more specifically as an inquiry into Hegel’s account of civil society (and Gramsci’s reappropriation of it) and into disciplinary society in Foucault’s sense, which Hardt deftly maps onto a Hegelian tradition to which Foucault is more habitually opposed. In Hegel’s thought, Hardt observes, civil society appears no longer as the counterpart to natural society (within a binary system), but rather in a tripartite relation to natural and political society both, where civil society names the civilizing or educative social processes that transform singular, natural man into the universal subject of the state—in particular, Hardt underscores, by transforming concrete into abstract labor. Foucault, of course, rejects outright any such analytical separation of political from civil society, theorizing the state, instead, as a consolidation, or “etatisation,” of power relations that traverse the social field, rather than as a discrete plane of political organization, much less the level to be prioritized in the analysis of power. Still, in the spread-out micropolitics of disciplinary institutions, Foucault traces the regulative social operations that Hegel associates with civil society, or in Hardt’s words, “The same educative social processes that Hegel casts in terms of abstraction and organization, Foucault recognizes in terms of training, discipline, and management” (1995, 32)—a sameness worth remarking, even though, as Hardt readily enough concedes, Foucauldian discipline, unlike Hegelian civil society, is not an ordering of natural or given social elements, not a restrictive apparatus, in short, but a productive one, that conjures the very identities to be managed.3 In this way, Hardt suggests, “Disciplinary society can be characterized as civil society seen from a different perspective, approached from underneath, from the microphysics of power relations” (1995; 33, my emphasis).
This argument subtends Hardt’s wider analysis of the contemporary decline of civil society, which (adopting Marx’s distinction), Hardt associates with the movement from the “formal” to the “real subsumption” of labor—for Marx, a tendency legible within nineteenth-century society, and for Hardt, “a passage that has only come to be generalized in the most completely capitalist countries of our times” (1995, 38). “Formal subsumption” names the encounter between capital and labor as capital finds it within precapitalist contexts—that is, as “as an imported foreign force, born outside capital’s domain,” which had therefore to be taken up by capital and “abstracted, recuperated, disciplined, and tamed within the productive processes” (1995, 38, 30). By contrast, in the process of “real subsumption,” the productivity of labor, aggregated and functionalized in ever more advanced (or scientific) ways, increasingly manifests as the productive power of social capital that “appears to reproduce itself autonomously.” What supports this derealization of productive relations under the conditions of real subsumption, in Hardt’s iteration of Marx, is precisely not a disciplinary process that would “extend vertically throughout the various strata of society” but rather the construction of “a separate plane, a simulacrum of society, that excludes or marginalizes social forces foreign to the system,” including, especially, the working class. Crucially, for Hardt, this transit from formal to real subsumption entails the withering of civil society because under the conditions of labor’s real subsumption, which is to say, under the conditions of capital’s apparent “emancipation” from labor, the state is “no longer interested in mediation or ‘education,’ but in separation, no longer in discipline but in control” (1995, 39).
The merit of Hardt’s analysis, it seems to me, is to bring into an original and compelling alignment disciplinary with civil society, and their “withering” with the work of the simulacrum. In this respect, his analysis tallies helpfully with my own insistence that the decline of disciplinary society corresponds to the erosion of popular sovereignty and the attendant evisceration of a representational politics. But Hardt also, and more problematically in my view, imagines the state’s retreat from the task of mediation as such, at the same time as he asserts the formation of a separate plane of simulated social relations, a “simulacrum of society” in which, one can only assume, the state remains altogether interested. Admittedly, the hyper-mediation of the simulacrum no longer appears as a mediation, in the sense of a movement between levels or domains of the social field, since the simulacrum does not appear to refer to (or communicate with) anything outside itself. Yet surely a simulacrum of society, fabricated under the auspices of the state, is a mediation of a different sort—one that functions, precisely, through the derealization of social planes, rather than their vertical integration.
In Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Golden Gulag, I find, among other things, a brilliant reflection on the state’s derealization of social relations as it pertains to the expansion of the prison system in California—a reflection that clarifies how simulation is also mediation, albeit one that no longer intervenes in “the fine grain of individual behaviors.” Starting from the observation that the increase in the size of the California inmate population corresponds to a notable decline in the rate of crime during the same period, Gilmore understands incarceration as a tactic for the management of surplus finance capital, surplus population, and surplus state capacity. As California divested from the maintenance and improvement of public works that had been funded through issuance of public debt, another outlet was required to absorb surplus finance capital—and the expansion of the prison system offered a resolution to the problem, an alternate way to keep private capital moving at public expense, while simultaneously putting to use the stalled administrative capacities of the post-welfare state and addressing the surplus population created through restructuring of labor markets. “The state built itself by building prisons fashioned from surpluses that the newly developing political economy [of California] had not absorbed in other ways,” Gilmore argues (2007, 54). Golden Gulag specifies with admirable analytical precision the shift from a disciplinary production of bourgeois sociality through the criminalization and institutionalized reform of deviance to the contemporary production of crime/criminality in the interest of directing capital and population flows. If the state’s attribution, prosecution, and sentencing of crime is now a function of calculations such as the optimum amount of surplus capital to siphon off into prison construction, this governmental practice is mediated through the simulacrum of rising urban crime—a mediation all the more frictionless and effective because it does not seek to interpellate social subjects across the social field so much as to saturate the field of virtual sociality.
Hardt’s largely persuasive argument for the withering of civil society stands in a curious and (by him) unacknowledged relation to the voluminous body of social science discourse that posits exactly the reverse: the efflorescence of civil society, as heralded particularly by the rise of the NGO. Indeed, in the world of disciplinary social science and of policy-makers (especially those attached to North American foundations and international lenders such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank), civil society is at a point of ascendance, rather than decline, its size and significance amplified by the dismantling of the welfare state on the one hand (the outsourcing of state service functions to NGOs and other civil society actors), and the perceived need for a “check” on the political dominance of market forces, which social service and human rights oriented associations are thought to provide, on the other. Data of the Johns Hopkins Comparative Non-Profit Sector Project, for instance, indicates that the nonprofit sector (excluding religious associations) in the twenty-two countries that project researchers examine (nations in Western and Eastern Europe, Latin America, as well as the United States, Australia, Israel, and Japan) is a $1.1 trillion industry, the equivalent of the world’s eighth largest economy, employing a larger workforce than the (combined) largest private firms in those same countries (Salamon et al. 1999, 8–9). In the statistical construction of empirical truth within social science and policy fields, civil society is flourishing, in other words. Writing in a more qualitative register, Michael Edwards, director of the Ford Foundation’s Governance and Civil Society Programs, casts civil society as the “big idea” of the contemporary moment. As a frame for this affirmation, Edwards constructs a tidy narrative of passage among essentially discrete conceptualizations of state/society relations, which constitutes, I would argue, the commonsense of policy discussions:
The weight attached to each of these models has shifted significantly over the last fifty years, with state-based solutions in the ascendancy from 1945 to the mid-1970s (the era of the welfare state of the North and centralized planning in the South), and market-based solutions in pole position from the late 1970s to 1990 or thereabouts (the era of Reagonomics in the North and structural adjustment in the South). Disaffection with the result of both these models—the deadening effect of too much state intervention and the human consequences of an over-reliance on the market—required a new approach that addressed the consequences of both state and market failure. This new approach, which gained strength through the 1990s, went by many names (including the “third way,” the “new localism,” and “compassionate conservatism”), but its central tenet is that partnership between all three “sectors” of society working together—public, private, and civic—is the best way to overcome social and economic problems. (2004, 10)
One strand of Edwards’s argument, then, is that civil society—or “associational life”—should not be understood or cultivated as a substitute service provider for the post-welfare state. Rather, he urges, civil society serves as a check on “vested interests,” promotes “accountability among states and markets,” directs information to “decision-makers”—undertakes the work of mediation among “sectors,” in short. Crucially, civil society in Edwards’s analytic is assumed to operate autonomously from the state and the market, so that its mediatory efforts appear to function authentically on behalf of the participants in associational life and of the wider “human” element compromised by market-oriented social policy. In order for civil society to realize these mediatory aims, states and markets must help foster an appropriate “civil society ecosystem,” which includes formal equality (a “level playing field for citizen action”) and domestic funding of civil associations, as civil society by itself, Edwards concedes, cannot set its own optimum conditions of possibility. Yet his analysis (like many others in the policy field) retains a sharp analytical separation of state, market, and society as the basis, precisely, for imagining a sort of managerial “partnership” among them.
At the same time, the administrative language of “problems,” “solutions,” and “partnership” suggests that this form of mediation is not primarily disciplinary in its aspirations and techniques. While Edwards remains interested in the conditions under which “associational life” might function normatively, fabricating and sustaining the “moral dispositions” that ensure “the health of democracy,” he is explicit that such normative achievements are relatively rare in practice, depending as they do on contingent, context-sensitive combinations of factors, which are difficult, if not impossible, to predict in advance (2004, 83–92). Indeed, the evacuated administrative categories that comprise the new discourse of civic engagement are hardly oriented to the cultivation of the “moral” citizen in the first place. Consider, for instance, how the Johns Hopkins researchers phrase their account of civil society’s (re)newed importance: “Because of their unique position outside the market and the state, their generally smaller scale, their capacity to tap private initiative in support of public purposes, and their newly rediscovered contributions to building ‘’social capital,’ civil society organizations have surfaced as strategically important participants in this search for a ‘middle way’ between sole reliance on the market and sole reliance on the state that now seems increasingly underway” (Salamon et al. 1999, 5). Whose “reliance,” we might well ask? The very formulation unsettles the claim to civil society’s (relative) autonomy on which “middle way” policy analysts insist, since the unnamed actor who “relies” already implies an organization of power that cuts across and incorporates state, market, and civil society—a structure of governance, let’s say, embodied in a managerial cadre, that encompasses the key functions and offices of government, “associations,” and corporations. In the present neoliberal conjuncture of political and economic forces, moreover, the management of social relations proceeds in the mode of problem-solving (rather than normalization), “strategic participa[tion]” (rather than institutionalization), and building “capacity” (rather than building hegemony). We find ourselves, in other words, precisely on the terrain of Hardt’s social simulacrum, where civil society as a wholly dereferentialized signifier acquires a new lease on life.
Partha Chatterjee’s recent writing on the Politics of the Governed declines to sound the death knell of civil society and to accede to the new nomenclature in which civil society is the totality of (presumed) non-governmental and non-market organizations, whose “middle-way” ethos appears oddly unimpaired by their own reliance on state and corporate funding. His reflections on civil society in a primarily Indian context also stand as an important reminder that the contours of neoliberal governance vary across localities, nations, and regions (for example, in relation to the historical distribution of the rights and benefits of citizenship), even as the questions and categories that emerge as salient for the Indian context are altogether germane to the discussion of citizenship in other national contexts, including the United States. Chatterjee begins by acknowledging the circumscribed scope of civil society in the Hegelian sense of “bürgerliche Gesellschaft,” alongside the proliferation of what is often conflated with civil society—namely “all existing social institutions that lie outside the strict domain of the state”; this conflation, he notes, is “rampant in the recent rhetoric of international financial institutions, aid agencies, and nongovernmental organizations, among whom the spread of a neoliberal ideology has authorized the consecration of every non-state organization as the precious flower of the associative endeavors of free members of civil society” (2004, 39). Despite its attenuated scope, Chatterjee nonetheless holds quite precisely to the concept of civil society as “bürgerliche Gesellshaft”: that is, civil society as it incorporates those social classes recognized as rights-bearing citizens by the state, or we might say, civil society as it engenders a body politic. In Chatterjee’s usage, civil society thus retains its historical alignment with “the nation-state founded on popular sovereignty and granting equal rights to citizens,” and in India today, he notes, as elsewhere in the global South, its members include “a relatively small section of the people, whose social location can be identified with a fair degree of clarity” (2004, 38). Chatterjee proposes the term “political society” for the heterogeneous array of associations that facilitate the state’s administration of subaltern classes not constituted as national citizens, excluded from this body politic in part because the activity of political society has often resisted the “modernizing project that is imposed on them” (2004, 51). This form of governmental administration, then, eschews the assimilative tactics of bourgeois nationalism in order to pursue “multiple policies of security and welfare,” or “the welfare and protection of populations—the pastoral functions of government, as Michel Foucault called it,” by means of “governmental technologies . . . largely independent of considerations of active participation by citizens in the sovereignty of the state” (2004, 37, 47). Thus Chatterjee’s differentiation of civil from political society rests specifically and emphatically on the claim that the category of the citizen, and its social reproduction, has become relatively marginal to the governance of populations in India (and elsewhere).
At issue in this comparative reading of selected critical and policy analyses is how or whether to understand civil society in the absence (or decline) of bourgeois sociality. In general, left academic work on the nonprofit sector cuts two ways. One important strand of scholarship locates in human rights and social justice oriented NGOs a new set of tactics for the pursuit of limited benefits within an extra-legal, administrative discourse. This work tends in particular to value grassroots labor organizations that pressure corporate employers through cross-border organizing. Another significant strand of scholarship raises the alarm about aid-oriented NGOs, in particular, as the latest instruments of (the new) imperial benevolence. Both these lines of argument are entirely persuasive on their own terms, though the move to champion or reject specific activist practices tends to preempt wider reflection on the overarching conditions—the possibilities and limitations—of political participation after popular sovereignty. Can there be citizenship without a body politic? Does political society, in Chatterjee’s sense of the phrase, or civil society, in the language of the foundations and the policy analysts, no longer serve a mediatory or educative purpose? Or is it, more precisely, that these practices of social mediation no longer assume a disciplinary character?
Chatterjee rigorously identifies citizenship with formal recognition of a rights-bearing subject by the state. By contrast, Hardt both insists that ours is a “post-civil” society and that it holds onto citizenship as a henceforth evacuated category. “Instead of disciplining the citizen as a fixed social identity,” he writes, “the new regime seeks to control the citizen as a whatever identity, an infinitely flexible placeholder for identity” (1995, 40). Wendy Brown makes a similar point (in a rather different critical idiom) when she identifies an emergent political formation “made possible by the production of citizens as individual entrepreneurial actors across all dimensions of their lives, by the reduction of civil society to a domain for exercising this entrepreneurship, and by the figuration of the state as a firm whose products are rational individual subjects, an expanding economy, national security, and global power” (2005, 57). Aihwa Ong refines and extends this line of argument, conceding that the “neoliberal subject is therefore not a citizen with claims on the state, but a self-enterprising citizen-subject who is obligated to become ‘an entrepreneur of him or herself’” (2006, 14). But why, on what terms, is this “whatever” identity citizenship? In what sense can the “production” of “individual entrepreneurial actors,” whether by state or non-state agencies, be understood as a production of citizens, or even of non-claimant “citizen-subjects”? Within the modern, nation-state synthesis, citizenship accrues to a national people at once sovereign and disciplined. The institutions of civil society reproduce citizens through processes of normative identification; by the same stroke, normative—properly “fix(at)ed”—citizens attain to political agency through participation (if only by proxy) in the exercise of state power. On what terms and to what effects do we extend the half-life of this category beyond its historical conditions of possibility? At the very least, I am suggesting, we need to investigate the contemporary forms and contexts of political participation under neoliberal governance. What might “participation” mean if citizens no longer comprise a national body politic where the sovereign agency of the state resides? In what imagined and (or) institutionalized civic bodies does the neocitizen now participate? And are the novel forms and contexts for our political self-realization still regulated through state-sponsored categories of social and juridical identity?
Recently, preoccupied with this inquiry, I found myself rereading Hannah Arendt and listening, quite unexpectedly, to a series of curious and complex reverberations between totalitarianism (as it emerges from Arendt’s Cold War historiography) and neoliberalism (or governmentality in the present phase of its emergent “pre-eminence” over sovereignty and discipline). The discontinuities are, of course, only too apparent: while both have global territorial ambitions, neoliberalism requires the local variations to which totalitarianism is hostile. Totalitarianism, as Arendt stresses, is party-centered, while neoliberalism is not a political movement and is not associated with any one political organization that would constitute its leading edge. Most strikingly, perhaps, totalitarianism, in Arendt’s analysis, possesses an anti-utilitarian character and is emancipated from the profit motive, to which market-driven neoliberalism is rigorously bound.
Still, amidst the incommensurable elements, continuities emerge; in totalitarianism and neoliberalism alike, the established, characteristically modern relation of the state to the nation unravels. On this point, Arendt’s analysis is sharply and polemically counterintuitive:
The totalitarian ruler must, at any price, prevent normalization from reaching the point where a new way of life could develop—one which might, after a time, lose its bastard qualities and take its place among the widely differing and profoundly contrasting ways of life of the nations of the earth. The moment the revolutionary institutions became a national way of life . . . totalitarianism would lose its “total” quality and become subject to the law of the nations, according to which each possesses a specific territory, people and historical tradition which relates it to other nations, which ipso facto refutes every contention that any specific form of government is absolutely valid. (1976, 391)
This erosion of the principles of national sovereignty—the refusal of the totalitarian state to uphold national interests, however defined—is what distinguishes totalitarianism from fascism in Arendt’s view, and underwrites her insistence on Nazism and Stalinism as totalitarianism’s problematically twinned instantiations. Moreover, it is the rejection of a national “way of life,” the refusal of any political distinction between “home” and foreign countries, which leads to the embrace of “bastard” culture, no longer oriented to the reproduction of the social body. Totalitarian power’s willing prostration of a national people proceeds hand in fist with a crisis of sovereign power, as it “has [also] exploded the very alternative on which all definitions of the essence of governments have been based in political philosophy, that is the alternative between lawful and lawless government, between arbitrary and legitimate power” (1976, 461).4 In less indignant terms, Foucault writes that contemporary governmental power, untethered from the rule of law, “allow[s] the continual definition of what should and should not fall within the state’s domain . . . what is and is not within the state’s competence” (2007, 109).
Rather than sustain a normative political culture, totalitarianism saturates all aspects of political and social reality, to which it lends something Arendt consistently describes as a fictive quality. It is not always evident how this fictionalized reality compares to ideology, which Arendt seems to use primarily in the sense of false consciousness; ideology is misrepresentation of experience, “with no power to transform reality” (1976, 471). On the status of ideology within totalitarian regimes, however, Arendt’s analysis is notably slippery. Ideology comes to seem both a driving and an incidental force within totalitarianism, in part because of the resolute formalism of Arendt’s analysis, which pays no heed to the ideological incommensurability of Nazism and Bolshevism. Yet it is also what she identifies (unevenly) as the curiously weightless quality of totalitarian ideology that makes this formalism a possible (albeit itself ideological) analytic choice. Thus Arendt suggests that the fictitious quality of everyday life in fact obviates the function of propaganda; there is no need to propagandize against Jews as an infestation if you can actually undertake to exterminate them. Yet elsewhere in the exposition, Arendt terms precisely “ideological” the capacity to declare an entire people as your enemy (to constitute “objective” enemies whose targeted status is entirely independent of their actions or intentions), a reversal that tends to affirm the function of ideology in “transforming reality” (1976, 423). Most striking, though, is that this very realization of ideology—the rendering of reality fictive—seems to enable, in fact necessitate, a kind of end-run around the work of ideology: conviction is eliminated as a motive for action, since “the aim of totalitarian education,” as Arendt underscores, “has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any” (1976, 468). “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule,” she goes on to affirm, “is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction . . . and the distinction between true and false . . . no longer exist” (1976, 474). Totalitarianism thus erodes rather than disciplines the inner lives of its subjects. It proceeds through a mobilization of the “masses,” by which Arendt means those elements of the population disqualified from political life, lacking common interests and characterized by political indifference. At the same time, this mobilization depends on the destruction of the public realm, the isolation of subjects by “destroying their political capacities” (1976, 475). So we are left with a paradoxical political mobilization that destroys the capacity to function as collective political agents, along with an ideological saturation of reality that seems to preempt, if not specifically foreclose, the process of ideological interpellation (of inculcating conviction).
My point in trying to render these reverberations is, in part, to feel out the contours of an alternate, supplementary genealogy of neoliberalism, which arrives not simply in tandem with the wider conditions of postmodernity (hyper-mediation, flexible accumulation) and out of the legacies of imperialism (the development of underdevelopment, mass migration to the metropolitan center), but also (perhaps counterintuitively) from modernity’s experiments in “total,” state-centered but not state-bound domination. I am also more specifically interested in the ways Arendt undertakes to consider totalitarian rule in its peculiar, non-reproductive dimensions and what her thought suggests about the shape of the dominated-but-undisciplined (indifferent and unconvinced) political subject, who hovers at the limits of her, and our, critical range. The subjects of neoliberal control are, of course, not the subjects of totalitarian domination, however fertile the comparison—and indeed, the comparison may well seem more pointed from my vantage in the United States, where the once crucial distinction between legitimate and arbitrary power no longer carries much political weight and where the convictions of its citizens are largely irrelevant to the operations of state power or the discourse of a simulacral public realm. From this vantage, certainly, we do well to ask (in language borrowed from Arendt, which echoes the administrative idiom of governmental practice), What are the “political capacities” of the neocitizen?
In place of a conclusion, I end with one further circuit through Cindy Patton’s revision of contemporary identity politics in an essay that offers a rather different gloss on the notion of a dereferentialized, “whatever” citizenship and also moves, provocatively, to address how the field for the cultivation and exercise of “political capacity” has shifted and reformed. Writing specifically on the relation of New Right to Queer Nation politics, Patton argues that “instead of understanding identity in an ego-psychological or developmental framework,” we might understand “identity discourse [as] a strategy in a field of power in which the so-called identity movements attempt to alter the conditions for constituting the political subject” (1993, 145). Born of a “modernist and essentializing impulse,” she contends, identity functioned within the modern state to extend representation, “expanding the context of what might count as a subject and increasing channels of access to an already constituted polis.” Notably, she goes on to suggest, “with the emergence of group identities that make no reference to a transcendent essence (as in both Queer Nation and the new right) the political presence no longer requires the pretense of representing some prediscursive constituency”; here, identity emerges as a tactical rather than foundational discourse in which the stakes are a contest over “the grammar of identity construction rather than a process of stabilizing the production of particular, individually appropriable identities” (1993, 161, 168). This shift in the functionality of identity corresponds with the changing orientation of the state, which no longer in its modern guise “integrates social factions to resolve conflict,” but rather multiplies and “holds pluralities apart” (1993, 172). Especially telling in this regard is Patton’s suggestion that these proliferating identities are not state-generated, though they are absolutely usable for the administrative project of the governmental state:
The crucial battle now for “minorities” and resistant subalterns is not achieving democratic representation but wresting control over the discourses concerning identity construction. The opponent is not the state as much as it is the other collectivities attempting to set the rules of identity construction in something like “civil society.” The problem is not one of cognitive or psychic dissonance—that is, that the right, for example, will not allow us to feel or be who we want to be, but that the terms for asserting identity are the categories of political engagement. The discursive practices of identity and the actors who activate them produce the categories of governmentality that engender the administrative state apparatus, not vice versa. (1993, 173; my emphasis)
In the place of mid-twentieth-century social movements, bound to the logic of popular sovereignty, Patton discerns a new field of “engagement,” in which political identity no longer constitutes a claim on recognition by the state within (and through amending) its preconstituted legal categories. Rather, the state, freed from its obligations to the integrated social body, sets conditions for the proliferation of identity within “something like civil society,” from which it derives the categories that enable an effective administration of a population (rather than a national people). In this regard, Patton’s argument converges on Chatterjee’s, for whom political society names precisely this arena, in which the state manages the welfare of those social elements who have no a priori, formal claim on the state’s attention.
From this perspective, however, citizenship is less an identity, or even (in Hardt’s phrase) a “placeholder for identity,” than identity (construction) is the field of “something like” citizenship—the context for the exercise of “political capacities.” These identities are no longer state-sponsored, as Patton astutely observes, precisely because what is functional for the state today is not an organic social body comprised of formally equivalent terms, but a profusion of “holographs,” or simulacral identities, to which the state can make a flexible, tactical response (if it chooses to respond at all). Such identities are susceptible to governmental techniques of “problem-solving”—they are not routed through the formal avenues and foundational edifice of legal recognition—so we do well to bear in mind that the state’s exercise of its “pastoral” charge may involve internment or extradition, as readily as grant-giving or limited regulation of an ever-more predatory capitalism. In this scenario, “something like” citizenship detaches from its historical imbrication in normative culture and reforms on a terrain that I am provisionally inclined to call serial culture. Unlike normative culture, serial culture does not differentiate among identities (between the normal and the pathological, for example), so much as cultivate a process of differentiation that produces an ever broader spectrum of identities. Rather than interpellate subjects through processes of compulsory (mis)recognition, serial culture releases them into a minutely regulated environment—regulated not because their positions are prescripted, but rather because their movements and affiliations are tracked (as so much social data), archived, mined, risk-assessed, and so (variably) policed, overlooked, or supported. The neocitizen who acts in and on this environment is visible to the state, even as the out-sourced state is rendered increasingly opaque and elusive to her.
In the end, I am concerned less with whether or not to call this political capacity a “bastard” neocitizenship than with what strikes me as the formidable and vexing question of how to think about this neocitizenship on the terrain of serial culture. What exactly do we look for—what constitutes ground gained in this “battle . . . over rules of identity construction,” when the rules are not norms that we engage through critical strategies of denaturalization and defamiliarization? What constitutes accommodation or opposition to the intentions of the state within the political arena of undisciplined sociality? Is it the aim of left political engagement to produce unmanageable identities that do not function in and for the neoliberal state? And what might an “unmanageable” identity be? (Will we know it when we see it?) Those of us on the Left in the U.S. academy, among many others in the global North and the global South today, are preoccupied, and rightly so, with the contemporary crisis of left politics, at times dwelling on the ostensible disappearance of an organized, sustained alternative to capitalism, at times, more optimistically, championing specific kinds of practices and associations as suggesting the terms of an emergent counter-mobilization. We pay less attention to the crisis of critique that symptomatizes this historical conjuncture, and the aim of this chapter has been to suggest why there is critical work to be done in reimagining the contours of critical engagement.