Acts of Citizenship

Engin F. Isin, Greg M. Nielsen, Engin F. Isin, Greg M. Nielsen

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781848135987
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civics & Citizenship
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book introduces the concept of 'act of citizenship' and in doing so, re-orients the study of what it means to be a citizen. Isin and Nielsen show that an 'act of citizenship' is the event through which subjects constitute themselves as citizens. They claim that such an act involves both responsibility and answerability, but is ultimately irreducible to either. This study of citizenship is truly interdisciplinary, drawing not only on new developments in politics, sociology, geography and anthropology, but also on psychoanalysis, philosophy and history. Ranging from Antigone and Socrates in the ancient world to checkpoints, euthanasia and flash mobs in the modern one, the 'acts' and chapters here build up a dynamic and wide-ranging picture. Acts of Citizenship provides important new insights for all those concerned with the relationship between individuals, groups and polities.

PART I

Politics, Ethics, Aesthetics

Chapter 1

Theorizing Acts of Citizenship

ENGIN F. ISIN

Citizenship in Flux: Subjects, Sites, Scales

It is now widely recognized that the social and political struggles over citizenship have acquired a new intensity (Isin and Turner 2002, 2007). What has become apparent more recently is that while citizens everywhere may be contained legally within state boundaries that enact rights and obligations, their own states are not subject to such containment. All states, through multilateral arrangements and international accords, implicate (or fail to implicate) their citizens involuntarily in a web of rights and responsibilities concerning the environment (wildlife, pollution), trade (copyright, protection), security, refugees, crime, minorities, war, children and many other issues. While the enforceability of these accords is a contested matter, every state exists in social, political or economic integration and is implicated in varying degrees of influence and autonomy. These complex webs of rights and responsibilities implicating citizens in various ethical, political and social decisions are important to keep in mind when thinking about citizenship today. What complicates this image further is that many citizens and non-citizens (illegal aliens, immigrants, migrants) of states have become increasingly mobile, carrying these webs of rights and obligations with them and further entangling them with other webs of rights and obligations. The status and habitus (ways of thought and conduct that are internalized over a relatively long period of time) of the subject we call the citizen is made infinitely more complex by its entanglements with these overflowing webs of rights and responsibilities.

Much has been debated concerning these matters in the past two decades, especially in the field of citizenship studies. By taking stock of these debates and suggesting that much of the focus has been on the status and habitus of citizenship, this chapter aims to outline a different perspective on the question of how subjects of the new overflowing rights and responsibilities enact themselves as citizens. It aims to constitute acts of citizenship as an object of investigation that is distinct from (but related to) the status and habitus of citizenship. After further defining the new context of global movements and flows, and articulating the need to focus on the concept of the act itself, I draw from several interdisciplinary thinkers who have investigated the concept of the act and outline a set of principles for theorizing acts of citizenship that will indicate the approach to citizenship we are building.

There is no doubt that the new intensity of struggles over citizenship is associated with global movements and flows of capital, labour and people. The movements of capital have created new sites of production and exchange of commodities across various boundaries and stretched limits of regulation. The creation of various zones, regions and territories to enable competitive production and exchange has created new sites of domination, exploitation and resistance. Similarly, global movements of labour across nations and states have generated new sites of struggle for both redistribution and recognition. As well as major movements into European, Anglo-American and Australian labour markets, there have been population movements within major states such as China and India. Meanwhile, within Anglo-American states, the post-war consensus on the welfare state and social citizenship has ended in a morass of vague disavowal, while neo-liberalization of the provision of social services has created new injustices and inequalities (Clarke 2004). This intensification of social relations through movements and flows has generated new affinities, identifications, loyalties, animosities and hostilities across borders.

Thus, whatever names are given to these processes of ‘globalization’, ‘neo-liberalization’ and ‘post-modernization’, and one can certainly question the adequacy of all or any of these names, various processes have combined to produce new, if not paradoxical, subjects of law and action, new subjectivities and identities, new sites of struggle and new scales of identification. Through these new subjects, sites and scales of struggle, citizenship, while typically understood as a legal status of membership in the state, if not the nation-state, became increasingly defined as practices of becoming claim-making subjects in and through various sites and scales (Isin 2008, forthcoming). These debates have illustrated that when combined with various adjectives such as ‘intimate citizenship’, ‘multicultural citizenship’, ‘sexual citizenship’, ‘transgendered citizenship’, ‘consumer citizenship’, ‘cosmopolitan citizenship’, or ‘ecological citizenship’, new identities could be investigated as the formation of new subjects, sites and scales of claim making (Clarke et al. 2007; Isin and Wood 1999; Kymlicka 1995; Kymlicka and Norman 2000; Lister 2002). This is not to say that there has been less emphasis on status but, rather, to suggest that most critical studies on citizenship focus on how status becomes contested by investigating practices through which claims are articulated and subjectivities are formed (Benhabib 2004; Soysal 1994). The effect of this shift to practices has been the production of studies concerning routines, rituals, customs, norms and habits of the everyday through which subjects become citizens. We can suggest that the impact of this body of work has been to include habitus (internalized or embodied ways of thought and conduct) alongside status within studies of citizenship (Bourdieu 1994; Schatzki 1997). This body of research has demonstrated effectively that virtues are cultivated, that citizenship is not inherited but learned, and that cultivating citizenship requires establishing supportive and relatively enduring practices and institutions (Allman and Beaty 2002).

Theorizing Citizenship: Status, Habitus, Acts

To put it another way, 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. Many scholars now differentiate formal citizenship from substantive citizenship and consider the latter to be the condition of possibility of the former. Not only has this been a productive development but it also corresponds and responds to the broad transformations mentioned earlier.

While this body of work has been useful and effective in demonstrating how citizenship involves habitus that is formed over a relatively long period of time, the question of how subjects become claimants under surprising conditions or within a relatively short period of time has remained unexplored. We know virtually nothing about how subjects become claimants when they are least expected or anticipated to do so. Granted, for subjects to become claimants they must have been embodying certain practices. Take, for example, the civil rights or feminist movements. Both developed over a relatively long period of time various resistance practices ranging from folklore, theatre or music to social and political networks. But both movements transformed subjects into claimants of rights over a relatively short period of time through various acts that were symbolically and materially constitutive. Who can forget the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955, when those named as ‘negroes’ claimed they could sit anywhere they wanted on the bus (Burns 1997)? Who can forget the hunger strike staged by British suffragette Marion Wallace Dunlop in Holloway prison in 1909, in protest against being refused the status of political prisoner (Fulford 1976)? These momentous acts required the summoning of courage, bravery, indignation, or righteousness to break with habitus. Without such creative breaks it is impossible to imagine social transformation or to understand how subjects become citizens as claimants of justice, rights and responsibilities. Thus, the difference between habitus and acts is not merely one of temporality but is also a qualitative difference that breaks habitus creatively.

The importance of making this difference cannot be overstated. Under what conditions do subjects act as citizens? How do subjects transform themselves into actors? How do subjects become claimants of rights, entitlements and responsibilities? If acts of citizenship cannot be reduced to status (for those who do not have status also demonstrate that they are capable of acting as claimants, while those who do have status may not be able to act as citizens), how do we name these acts without inferring them from the status of actors already named? Furthermore, acts cannot be reduced to practices because to enact oneself as a citizen involves transforming oneself from a subject into a claimant, which inevitably involves a break from habitus (Farnell 2000). Yet acts are necessary but not sufficient conditions of the social transformation of subjects into citizens. If this is so, how do we investigate acts through which subjects transform themselves into citizens?

It is now vitally important to expand our investigations to enable us to understand the decisions involved in making subjects into citizens. To investigate acts of citizenship in a way that is irreducible to either status or habitus, while still valuing this distinction, requires a focus on those moments when, regardless of status and substance, subjects constitute themselves as citizens – or, better still, as those to whom the right to have rights is due (Arendt 1951; Balibar 2004; Rancière 2004). To investigate acts of citizenship is to draw attention to acts that may not be considered as political and demonstrate that their enactment does indeed instantiate constituents (which may mean being part of a whole as well as being a member of a constituency). The enactment of citizenship is paradoxical because it is dialogical. The moment of the enactment of citizenship, which instantiates constituents, also instantiates other subjects from whom the subject of a claim is differentiated. So an enactment inevitably creates a scene where there are selves and others defined in relation to each other. These are not fixed identities but fluid subject positions in and out of which subjects move. In other words, being always involves being with others. These subject positions can be analytically identified on a spectrum of intensity ranging from hospitality to hostility: citizens, strangers, outsiders and aliens. Becoming a subject involves being implicated in this spectrum (Isin 2002, 2005). The dialogical principle of citizenship always involves otherness. Several questions thus arise regarding theorizing acts of citizenship. How do subjects such as citizens and others such as strangers, outsiders or aliens break away from these positions? If indeed acts of citizenship are fundamental ways of being with others, how do beings decide between solidaristic (generous, magnanimous, beneficent, hospitable, accommodating, understanding, loving), agonistic (competitive, resistant, combative, adverse) and alienating (vengeful, revengeful, malevolent, malicious, hostile, hateful) acts towards others? What actualizes those acts? Could theorizing acts of citizenship provide the means through which to differentiate acts that are worth resisting and those that are worth cultivating? These questions cannot be answered without constituting acts as an object of investigation. Only then can we begin to understand what makes certain acts ‘acts of citizenship’. There are acts of violence, hospitality, hostility, indifference, love, friendship and so on, and, while they can be intertwined with acts of citizenship, these different kinds of acts are not reducible to each other. They must remain distinct and distinguishable for our investigations. To investigate these questions, however, requires going beyond the field of citizenship studies. It requires working through some of the crucial issues of social and political thought. What theoretical sources can we draw on from social and political thought for investigating acts? We now turn our attention to that question by using concepts developed by Adolf Reinach, Martin Heidegger and Mikhail Bakhtin, and then taken up by Jacques Lacan, Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida: all these thinkers, I argue, have investigated the nature of acts implicitly and partially, albeit in different – yet congruent – ways. (The notable exceptions are Reinach and Bakhtin, who argued that acts should be an object of investigation.) Then we shift our focus to address acts of citizenship specifically and discuss how they might be investigated.

Orders, Practices, Acts

How does social and political thought constitute acts as an object of investigation? This is a more complex question than it first appears, for two reasons. First, social and political thought has not given much attention to acts as an object of analysis. Searching scrutiny has been devoted to the concept of ‘action’ but very little to the concept of ‘the act’. We shall articulate a difference between the concepts of ‘act’ and ‘action’ later; suffice it for now to say that analysis of the former remains fragmented, varied and mostly contained within the concept of speech acts (Austin 1962; Searle 1969; Smith 1990). Second, it would be fair to suggest that modern social and political thought, at least, has been dominated by a concern with order rather than disruption. This is despite a voluminous literature on revolutions, which really investigates them as different kinds of order – as Žižek (1999) illustrates. Both reasons are provocative, so let us briefly discuss them before we turn our attention to theorizing acts.

If we survey the state of social and political thought today there are a number of concepts that are dominant but the concept of the ‘act’ is not one of them. We are concerned about ‘practices’, ‘conduct’, ‘discipline’, ‘rule’, ‘governance’ and ‘action’, to describe what agents do and how they behave, but not ‘acts’. This state of affairs often values routine over rupture, order over disorder, and habit over deviation. When the second concepts in these pairs come into focus they are often considered as ‘distortion’ of the first concepts. It appears that to describe, explain or account for those routines by which humans order their social and political relations is more important than their ruptures or breaks. The predominant focus has become the way in which people conduct themselves and routinize certain habits in their bodies, develop certain behaviours, and follow certain rules. It seems that social sci...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• About the Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Politics, Ethics, Aesthetics
• Part II: Citizens, Strangers, Aliens, Outcasts
• Part III: Sites and Scales of Answerability
• Notes
• Index