Securitizations of Citizenship

Peter Nyers

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415485296
• eBook ISBN: 9781134012565
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Securitizations of Citizenship investigates how the fate of citizenship is now caught up in a dramatic and dangerous process of securitizing political communities. In the nervous state of affairs of the post-9/11 period, technologies of surveillance and control are rapidly proliferating, creating severe constraints for the enactment of citizenship practices. While citizenship has always faced the problem of exclusiveness, the contemporary relationship between security, territory, and population is being transformed in ways that are creating new dynamics of exclusion for citizens, non-citizens, and quasi-citizens alike.

This book assesses a variety of citizenship practices in relation to the emergence of forms of governance that are responsive to – and constitutive of – fears, anxieties, and insecurities in the population. At the same time, the book identifies and assesses citizenship practices for how they can mobilize progressive forces to militate against the nervous, anxious and fearful subjectivities instigated by newly securitized sovereignties. In the critical spaces between inclusion and exclusion, migration and mobility, security and surveillance, reason and neurosis, biopower and sovereign power, the contributors to this book reflect upon the possibilities and constraints for refiguring citizenship today.

1 The neurotic citizen

Engin F. Isin

Why not risk?

Considering a cluster of questions under the concept ‘the neurotic citizen’ and ‘governing through neurosis’ may imply that such problems may have been taken up on the literature concerning risk, which has become one of the most debated concepts in social and political thought. To differentiate the nature and necessity of the questions I wish to pose, it will be necessary to briefly address that literature. The thesis on ‘risk society’ joined other theses such as ‘market society’, ‘postindustrial society’, and ‘network society’ in describing the transformations in state societies. (Throughout this paper I use the term ‘state societies’ to designate Anglophone states, primarily English Canada, the United States, Australia, and England. However, the appropriateness of what I shall describe as ‘governing through neurosis’ may well be greater than this immediate scope.) The question that concerns me is what facts have been reordered for the declaration of a risk society and how these facts are mobilized to create the image of a society that is governed by risk.

Whether it is Luhmann (1993), Beck and Ritter (1992), Douglas (1992), Douglas and Wildavsky (1982), or Giddens (1990), for these theorists, state societies have become risk societies because subjects govern their conduct through risk and governments primarily constitute themselves as safeguarding their subjects from risks, and these risks transcend the boundaries of the state. For Beck (2000), the paradigmatic case of all this was the environment with the rise of environmental politics but it has now spread to other fields of government such as health, security and technology. In all these areas, the legitimacy of governments depends on their ability to manage risks on behalf of their citizens. While this literature is diverse, the shared assumption seems to be that however risks come into being, it is impossible to govern state societies without managing those risks. There are two features of these risks that differentiate them from risks that other societies had to confront. First, while we know that these risks carry significant, if not catastrophic, consequences, we are not certain about their realization. Second, these risks, also unlike other risks, are based upon ‘manufactured uncertainties’ because they are direct results of scientific and technological interventions into nature that disrupt its balance (Zizek, 1999: 335). These two features combine to create a situation where more production of knowledge is called upon to manage the risks it has created. This ‘reflexive modernization’ or the ‘second enlightenment’ creates a situation where we have to make decisions and we are held responsible for those decisions that we were forced to make without adequate knowledge of the situation (Zizek, 1999: 338).

What facts are produced and reordered for this interpretation? The fundamental fact seems that with the increasing complexity of environments in which we live, citizens in state societies are subject to varieties of risk ranging from environmental hazards to health and security dangers. Citizens demand that these risks be managed if not alleviated. We have experienced many risks in the last few years: failing safeguards for water management leading to the deaths of citizens, new epidemics such as AIDS and SARS, food chain contamination such as BSE and risks emanating from intensified global mobility and flows such as terrorism and other security threats such as ‘dangerous’ refugees. When we put all this together the picture that indeed emerges looks like a risk society where many collective and individual decisions are increasingly governed by the need to reduce these risks to societies. When we compare the current governmental and social discourse with governing mentalities of the 1960s and 1970s and remember such governmental projects as elimination of poverty and unemployment, it certainly makes one convinced that indeed priorities have radically changed and that we must be living in a society that is governed by its aversions to risk.

But the risk society theories are problematic from the point of view that I wish to develop in this paper for two reasons. First, there is hardly any analysis of how various dangers and threats become risks. While there is a concern about reflexivity and manufacturing of risks, just how reflexivity produces those risks and by what mechanisms and practices remain neglected areas. In other words, if one is curious about the social and political practices by which certain dangers and threats have been constituted as risks, risk society theories are rather inadequate about asking such questions. Instead, a society is portrayed in which various groups mobilize their concerns about risks that are already agreed upon and governments attempt to respond to them by enacting policies that are designed to manage or reduce these risks. That way risk management becomes the primary mode of agreement between citizens and governments. Second, it also appears that risks are determined in a level playing field where various groups make their cases and governments choose amongst them. But these problems are not intractable and perhaps theories of risk society already contains answers to them. In my view, the fundamental weakness remains the subject that mobilizes or lies at the centre of such a society. This is perhaps, as Zizek pointed out, the most important inadequacy of risk society theories, which underestimate the radical anxieties that the changes thus described both presuppose and produce in affecting the modern subject. As Zizek puts it, risk society theories ‘leave intact the subject’s fundamental mode of subjectivity: their subject remains the modern subject, able to reason and reflect freely, to decide on and select his/her set of norms, and so on’ (Zizek, 1999: 342).

This can also be seen in the literature on ‘culture of fear’. We are told that heightened concerns about certain dangers that become risks are related to how immanent fears in societies have been exploited by governments, corporations, professions (e.g., law, medicine, advertising, accountancy, marketing), and others who have much to gain from producing such risks. Such practices in turn create a ‘culture of fear’ that makes people vulnerable to overreaction to risks. Furedi (2002) and Glassner (1999) give numerous examples how such a culture of fear has been generated in the past few decades to benefit from commodification of fear. Their examples are underlined by a repetitive and homologous pattern: that by producing a culture of fear, society is asked to invest in practices that statistically speaking constitute much lower risks while those genuinely high risks are made trivial, mundane and routine. The culture of fear thesis has in a sense become an explanatory framework for the rise of risk society. The established interests in society benefit from the production of certain risks and fuel a culture of fear, which in turn produces a society governed by risk disproportionate to actual dangers that these risks might constitute. The risk society undergirded by a culture of fear becomes vulnerable to the emergence of panics, gate communities, security industries, and an overall trend toward isolation and insularity (Davis, 1999).

There is much that is intriguing in this literature on fear that is worth taking into account. It does point out many practices that have become prevalent in state societies that directly emanate from what might one call ‘accumulation of fear’. It is also salient to emphasize that many fears on which people have come to conduct their lives – from where and how they live to what they do for work or recreation – on the basis of ‘perceived’ dangers rather than any objectively calculable or measurable ‘real’ dangers. Yet, from the point of view of understanding the subject that is at the centre of an ostensible culture of fear, this literature over fear has also serious shortcomings. First, while it is important to point out that people conduct their lives on the basis of perceived dangers, it is problematic to underestimate the importance of affect in how subjects conduct themselves. It is well known that affects and emotions are integral component of everyday conduct. Such states are called affects and emotions precisely because they do not fit into rational categories of calculation and assessment. Yet they are equally important in how subjects assess their probabilities and opportunities. It is even more problematic to assume that urging governments, corporations and professions to present more truthful scenarios to their citizens, consumers and clients can rectify this ‘problem’. This misunderstands the importance of the fact that people not only conduct their lives with affects and emotions but also in the absence of capacities for evaluating full and transparent information. Second, while it is laudable to call upon governments, corporations and professions to address citizens, consumers and clients without ‘distortion’, this assumption overlooks the fact that governments, corporations and professions also govern through risk rather than aiming to eliminate it altogether. If we genuinely believe that governments, corporations and professions govern conduct by merely deceiving their citizens, consumers, and clients, we are both seriously overestimating their powers and underestimating those of citizens, consumers and clients. These assumptions can easily mislead to proposals that would ostensibly restore public faith in deliberation and democracy: that assessment of risk should be based upon rational cost and benefit analyses to inform citizens, consumers and clients about real and perceived dangers (Sunstein, 2002).

The issue of risk has also been taken up by the literature on governmentality. As O’Malley (1999) suggests, the risk society thesis does not quite agree with the sensibilities of a research programme more inspired by Foucault than contemporary literature. Foucault was deeply skeptical about totalizing generalizations and both ‘risk society’ and ‘culture of fear’ literatures easily approximate the kinds of pronouncements he was skeptical about. Moreover, Foucault’s primary interest was in the formation of a subject who is not simply an object of or subject to governmental projects but is governed through its freedom (Rose, 1999). What that means is that through technologies of the self, the subject governs its conduct by calculating the advantages and disadvantages of a course of action upon herself and the other within the context and field in which she is embedded. Governing oneself by calculating risks involves using various technologies but also it means that governmental authorities do not simply manipulate the subject but govern it as a free subject by encouraging, inculcating, and suggesting certain ways of conduct that increase the health, wealth, and happiness (Bennett, 1999; O’Malley, 1996; 1998; 1999; Parton, 1998; Petersen, 1996; Rose, 1996; Turner, 1997). ‘Governing through risk’ therefore means neither exploiting whatever fears subjects may have nor deceiving them to distort their sense of balance between perceived and real dangers but inviting them to speak truths about themselves, their conditions, and the assessments by which they conduct their selves. In all these practices, subjects are encouraged to conduct themselves in the most beneficial ways to their health, wealth and happiness in ways that are rational, interested and calculating.

There are many great examples of this rational subject in the governmentality studies that I will not reiterate here. But I will briefly mention O’Malley’s (2000) concept of ‘uncertainty’ to illustrate that he too takes a calculating, logical subject at its centre. O’Malley has provided a genealogy of the concept of uncertainty to throw light on the formation of the subject under conditions of risk. His argument essentially hinges on the concept of uncertainty representing a distinctive way of ‘governing through the future’. As O’Malley suggests, risk society theories rarely analyze uncertainty ‘as a distinctive modality of governance that is associated with specific ways of problematizing the future, and with associated techniques of the self and technologies of government’ (O’Malley, 2000: 461). By contrast, he suggests that uncertainty ‘is a characteristic modality of liberal governance that relies both on a creative constitution of the future with respect to positive and enterprising dispositions of risk taking and on a corresponding stance of reasonable foresight or everyday prudence (distinct from both statistical and expert-based calculation) with respect to potential harms’ (O’Malley, 2000: 461). The subject that still remains at the centre of attention is the rational subject. Whether through liberal or neoliberal rationalities, the subjects ‘practice and sustain their autonomy by assembling information, materials and practices together into a personalized strategy that identifies and minimizes their exposure to harm’ (O’Malley, 2000: 465). Moreover, ‘their liberty exists in the capacity to choose rationally among available options and to assemble from these the risk-minimizing elements of a responsible lifestyle’ (O’Malley, 2000: 465). It is this rational subject that seems to govern itself without affects or emotions and it is able to responsibilize itself by calculation. There are many practices around us that calls this subject into question (see Watson, 1999). I will shift my focus to these practices, which I shall call ‘governing through neurosis’ but I will first briefly discuss Foucault’s concept of biopolitics as it pertains to this concept.

As is well known, Foucault developed his conception of biopolitics in the late 1970s and articulated it in the last chapter of the first volume of his History of Sexuality (1978) and his Collège de France lectures in 1978 and 1979 (Lemke, 2001). Foucault argued that in the nineteenth century a peculiar form of power had emerged that he would call biopower. For centuries during the early modern era, in barracks, hospitals, asylums, schools, prisons a disciplinary power had formed that was specifically focused on the body: taming it, harnessing its energies and training its capacities that formed the backbone of the emerging absolutist state and mercantilist economy (Foucault, 1973; 1979). But by the eighteenth century this form of power was increasingly articulated into a kind of power that was focused on what Foucault called the species-body: that the body was an element of a species-body with its own regularities, rules, laws, properties and attributes. Moreover, new sciences emerged – political arithmetic and then political economy – that claimed to have discovered laws and determined the conditions of a wealthy economy, healthy population and happy society. Such entities as economy, population and society were irreducible to bodies that constituted them but were shaped by them. Foucault called that power which took as its object to calibrate the relationship between the body and the species-body as biopower. What was new about biopower, he argued, was its simultaneously individualizing and totalizing character. In other words, the object of biopower was a peculiar ‘calibration’. Governing subjects required a calibration of their conduct to the requirements of species-bodies – economy, population, and society – in a manner that involved fine adjustments to both the body and the species-body. This mutual adjustment required producing knowledge about the workings of both bodies but also about their mutual adjustment processes. Biopolitics mobilized the production of knowledge that was appropriate to biopower precisely because its object was to optimize and enhance the mutual capacities of the body and the species-body.

We can now return to the notion of ‘governing through risk’ with a little more robustness (Bennett, 1999; Dean, 1995; 1998; Nettleton, 1997). If biopolitics identifies certain dangers and risks to species-bodies such as economy, population or society, it requires adjustment or calibration of conduct of the body that is appropriate to reducing the risk that it poses to the species-body. Again, numerous cases have been studied to illustrate that such policy areas as pregnancy, alcoholism, child abuse, environmental hazards, productivity, addiction, and many others become ‘problematized’ precisely from the point of view of the calibration that brings together technologies of the self and technologies of power. If technologies of the self incite subjects to govern themselves to become healthy, wealthy and happy, technologies of power ensure that such health, wealth and happiness articulate those attributes of species-bodies, population, economy and society. Thus, reducing risks to the species-body is directly related to reducing risks to bodies and requires that subjects govern themselves to assess, evaluate and reduce such risks.

While subjects would obviously become embedded in certain rationalities to enact such a calibration, it is conceivable that these rationalities would also include affects and emotions. Although Foucault used the concept rationalities of government or power often, there is nothing in his thought that limits including logics of affect into such rationalities. Nonetheless, while Foucault mobilized the metaphor of biopolitics from biological sciences to highlight the difference between knowledge-power that operates on the body and the species-body, biological sciences have significantly changed their character in the last two decades. If biopolitics of the nineteenth century was focused on adjusting conduct appropriate to the species-body, biopolitics of the late twentieth century increasingly focused on biomedical management of the subject (Novas and Rose, 2000). It may well be argued that the focus in the twentieth century was less on the discipline of the subject but its control in the way Deleuze (1990) suggested, which incorporate new ways of governing subjects.

I want to suggest that the metaphor ‘biopolitics’ does not adequately capture or account for the subject who is governed through its affects. At the centre of biopolitics was what I call the bionic citizen, a subject whose rational and calculating capacities enabled it to calibrate his conduct. The modern, liberal subject as bionic citizen was constituted or interpreted as a competent subject whose conduct and government were crucial for the health, wealth and happiness of species-bodies. The bionic citizen was rational and able to calculate risks remarkably well. In fact, the image that dominated late twentieth century biopolitics that was named as ‘neoliberalism’ precisely operated with the bionic citizen at its centre. Between liberalism and neoliberalism there is no difference as regards the image of the citizen. I would like to suggest that the bionic citizen was an overcharged and over-burdened image of the citizen. By interpreting the liberal and neoliberal subject as the bionic citizen, who was self-sufficient, self-regarding and was governed in and through its freedom, we may have unconsciously participated in the production of a phantasy.

The phantasy of the bionic citizen is still amongst us and I am not announcing its death. But I wish to draw our attention to anoth...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The neurotic citizen
• 2 Secure borders, safe haven, domopolitics
• 3 Renormalizing citizenship and life in Fortress North America
• 4 (Dis)qualified bodies
• 5 Security, flexible sovereignty, and the perils of multiple citizenship
• 6 The accidental citizen
• 7 Political belonging in a Neoliberal era
• 8 The production of culprits
• 9 Citizenship for all