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Ingenious Citizenship
Recrafting Democracy for Social Change
By Charles T. Lee Duke University Press
Copyright © 2016 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7483-1
CHAPTER 1
Improvising Citizenship
Appropriating the Liberal Citizenship Script
In Consumers and Citizens, Néstor García Canclini urges a rethinking of the social practice of commodity consumption as a key site in reinvigorating citizenship. Deconstructing the conventional binary frame that juxtaposes the rational and deliberative citizen against the passive and irrational consumer, he writes, "The exercise of citizenship has always been associated with the capacity to appropriate commodities and with ways of using them" (García Canclini 2001, 15).
Here, García Canclini significantly updates prior political thought by indicating that the exercise of citizenship, including the ways in which we organize our social belonging and network, are steeped in practices of consumption and their accompanying logics of negotiation and appropriation (20). Yet his critical rendering of consumption as constitutive of citizenship nonetheless leaves citizenship as something external and immune to consumption and appropriation. Specifically, García Canclini's reading of citizenship as a capacity to appropriate commodities overlooks that citizenship may also be seen as a cultural commodity in itself — an object that is constantly appropriated and negotiated by citizen-subjects and "citizens in waiting."
In this chapter, I extend García Canclini's revision of political thought to propose a reconception of liberal citizenship as an appropriable, globalized cultural script — a mundane material and cultural artifact that is continually revised and reused by "abject consumers" in devising informal spaces of rights, inclusion, and belonging. While existing scholarship has conceptualized and investigated citizenship in different ways, I understand liberal citizenship as a materially scripted way of life — that is, as a standardizing and domineering cultural script of citizenship brought into being by European capitalist modernity to govern how human subjects ought to live and participate as "proper" citizens in different realms, such as the political, the economic, the gender binary, and life itself.
To speak of this script as being ripe for appropriation is not to understate its power in mapping a broad cultural-material terrain of human social life that it facilitates in making and reproducing. Embedded in the modern liberal world order, this full-blown cultural script of citizenship interpellates the "proper" ways for humans to be citizens in different social spheres to reproduce domesticated subjects who will be kept in place. It works to minimize and soften the presence and potency of deviant transgressions in ensuring the mundane reproduction of social life. Citizenship, the script, might be seen by many as necessary rules and social norms. But it is also ideological and biopolitical — a particular way to perform citizenship that has been crafted, articulated, and disseminated as "common sense" and materialized and reproduced into a way of life in contemporary liberal democracy. The script does not merely define or impose a life of citizenship externally on citizens; it is itself the life to be lived, through and through and cycle after cycle, by citizen-subjects. It is this human cycle of citizenship that sustains liberal democracy, but in acting the same script over and over, it performs a life that is banal and cannot grow outside itself.
Understanding liberal citizenship as a cultural script serves two critical objectives. First, to the extent that the script instructs human subjects on the "normal" way to conduct themselves as citizens in different social spheres and institutions, this conception illustrates how the ideological and material force of normality takes hold through the script and becomes crystallized as common sense in liberal life. The citizenship script is utilized by liberal democracy as an essential tool of surveillance and control to ensure the continuation of its lifecycle. In its production of liberal citizenship, the script produces normality (proper citizens) and abjection (abject subjects) as mutually constitutive formations. As indicated in the introduction, the normality of proper citizens presupposes the existence of the abject — those who could not "measure up" or conform to the script — for its own constitution. Thus remaindered but also serving as its constitutive outside, the abject exists precariously in the interstices of liberal citizenship.
Second, conceiving citizenship as script not only underlines its seemingly invincible production of normality and abjection, but it can also serve as a template to trace how abject subjects inventively and resourcefully disrupt and appropriate the script to generate more inhabitable spaces for themselves. The mutually constitutive formation between the proper and the abject is never stable, in essential part because the abject are imbued with agency, and their everyday acts and practices can be read as constantly improvising ways to resist their state vis-à-vis the liberal citizenship script. In this way, seeing citizenship as script can enable a horizon in viewing and theorizing abject subjects' ingenious agency and illustrating the limited change generated through such agency in hegemonic liberal life. In sum, it activates a rethinking about abject subjects' quotidian practices as ingenious citizenship.
Linking citizenship to the liberal script thus provides the structural and political context for my theorization of ingenious agency and change in relation to the abject. In this book, I direct my analysis to four major sites at which the liberal citizenship script is disrupted and appropriated: migrant domestic workers' workplace tactics staged against employers, global sex workers' purposeful abjection of their bodies, trans people's remodeling of gender identification and sexual practices, and acts of suicide bombing. Ingenious agency shines through prominently in the capacity of these abject subjects, who fall through the cracks of conventional citizenship, acting inventively and resourcefully to survive and reclaim limited spaces of dignity, inclusion, and belonging. In all of these instances, ingenious agency does not simply register a direct deviation from the norm. Rather, it imparts a subtle and subversive quality that involves appropriating the liberal citizenship script — thus, both Assuring and inhabiting the norm — to circuitously reanimate a remaindered and dispossessed citizenship.
As I articulate below, while my focus in this book is on the liberal script, I do not see it as the only existing script: whether in the Unites States or elsewhere, there are always competing scripts in different local contexts. I wish to emphasize, however, that the liberal citizenship script does manifest its hegemonic aspirations to the extent that local scripts in non-Western regions often have to compete or negotiate with its disseminating effects, resulting in discrepant formations of liberal subjects. I understand the liberal citizenship script as containing elements of ideology (à la Marx), hegemony (à la Gramsci), and discourse (à la Foucault) that exist in a constantly shifting continuum. This moving continuum molds different types of liberal citizen-subjects in varied sites, rendering the script both durable (hegemonic) and elastic (heterogeneous) in its distribution across geographic borders. It may be helpful to understand the globalized liberal script in terms of what Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan have conceived as "scattered hegemonies," which, in traveling across national boundaries, produce syncretic, irregular, and discrepant effects (1994, 7).
In fact, the notion of scattered hegemonies allows us to understand the hegemonic aspirations of the liberal script even when it does not neatly encompass the entire globe. As James Ferguson reminds us from the vantage point of Africa, while neoliberal networks in the forms of transnational capital and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) "do indeed 'span the globe,' ... they do not cover it. Instead, they hop over (rather than flowing through) the territories inhabited by the vast majority of the African population" (2006, 14; emphasis added). This hopping effect of neoliberalism, which connects enclaved points "in a selective, discontinuous, and point-to-point fashion," results in "highly elective and spatially encapsulated forms of global connection combined with widespread disconnection and exclusion," leaving "most Africans with only a tenuous and indirect connection to 'the global economy'" (14).
Yet even such exclusion and disconnection from globalization do not take place outside neoliberal forces. As Ferguson notes, there exist among African populations strong "aspirations to 'development,' 'modernity'" (2006, 16), or "yearnings for cultural convergence with an imagined global standard" (20). He writes, "The same processes that produce exclusion, marginalization, and abjection are also producing new forms of non-national economic spaces, ... new forms of government by NGO and transnational networks, ... and new kinds of more or less desperate claims to membership and recognition at a supranational level" (14).
The "global" in Africa consists of "capital flows and markets [that] are at once lightning fast and patchy and incomplete; where the globally networked enclave sits right beside the ungovernable humanitarian disaster zone" (Ferguson 2006, 49). As Aihwa Ong has argued in another context, neoliberal rationality involves calculations regarding which populations or sites are included for investment and mobilization in relation to capital accumulation and which populations or sites are excluded from such enterprise, thus resulting in "varied effects on the constitution of citizen-subjects and the spaces that they inhabit" (2005, 257). I suggest that these splintering effects can be attributed to the moving continuum and scattered hegemonies of the traveling liberal script.
I also wish to note that the abject subjects in my reading intervene in the global power dynamics of liberal citizenship from varying positions in, relations to, and distances from U.S. citizenship: some as formal citizens, some as aliens who participate within the arrangement of formal citizenship, and others as nationals of other sovereign states and localities. Extending on Engin Isin's conception that citizenship is irreducible to matters of membership but instead is dynamically constituted through political subjectivity (Isin 2002, 2008, 2009), I argue that what is central about the abject subjects in the present study is precisely how their everyday acts, practices, and discourses can be read as politically interrupting and appropriating the widely disseminated script of liberal citizenship across national geographic boundaries, irrespective of their formal membership status. This reading expands the scope of understanding the abject as contributing to the rewriting of the liberal citizenship script in original and resourceful ways, thus contriving and extending new lineations of social change. In addition, since the liberal script interacts with competing scripts in different local and regional contexts, attention will be given to local complexity in accordance with the objective of critical contextualization. Given that this project is not meant as an ethnographic study, my objective is not to provide detailed information on the local background of every case. However, I will provide an appropriate amount of analysis of contextual differences among subjects in their local conditions to add nuance to my observation.
One question may be raised here. As recent critical scholarship from various disciplines has charged, citizenship is a limiting political category, a bourgeois concept and institution that is riven by and incapable of transcending Western, imperial, racial, class, gender, and sexual exclusion and subordination. So can a political project inspired by the conception of ingenious citizenship provide any substantive vision of social transformation? In response, I suggest that while we ought to recognize the limits of citizenship, the analysis should not stop there. Instead, we can extend the analysis by asking: Can there be value even in these limits, especially if one considers the subjects' contexts?
That is to say, whether there is political value in a social phenomenon depends on the locations from which one observes: what might appear to be a limiting political concept from one angle might be redeployed and used for innovative empowerment in another context. Ferguson's research on Africa provides a useful illustration of this phenomenon. As he notes, while critics of neoliberalism often hold in contempt the "homogenizing" goods and forms of global culture, they ignore that these things are unavailable to most Africans (Ferguson 2006, 20). The hardships of Africa thus "have very little to do with being overrun with Western factories and consumer goods" when countries there "are begging in vain for foreign investment of any kind and unable to provide a significant market for the consumer goods stereotypically associated with globalization" (26). In this scenario, African desires for "'likeness' with real and imagined Western standards" should not simply be interpreted as "mental colonization or capitulation to cultural imperialism." Rather, they should be seen as "an aspiration to overcome categorical subordination" (20). Ferguson writes, "Claims of likeness, in this context, constitute not a copying, but a shadowing, even a haunting — a declaration of comparability, an aspiration to membership and inclusion in the world, and sometimes also an assertion of a responsibility" (17; emphasis added).
Similarly, when we place abject subjects in the critical context of their "uninhabitable" abjection from the citizenship script that immanently defines them, their aspirations for inclusion should not simply be dismissed — or defined — as capitulation to an unequal structural order. Rather, these limited and complicit aspirations for normative citizenship might be reinterpreted as "a powerful claim to a chance for transformed conditions of life — a place-in-the-world, a standard of living, a 'direction we would like to move in'" (Ferguson 2006, 19). Following Ferguson, claiming a place in the world can disruptively compel the "normal" to acknowledge their "relationships and responsibilities in a larger system" (22).
Taking this a step further, and more specifically for my purpose, I suggest that it is precisely the limiting category of citizenship that provides an entry point for us to understand how abject subjects, situated in their contexts, are obtaining what I term nonexistent citizenship, or the informal and nonguaranteed spaces of inclusion, equity, and rights that are gained through inventive disruption and appropriation of the liberal script. It is also through these improvisations of nonexistent citizenship that we see how the abject resort to creative and unordinary means, with the limited tools and resources they have, to obtain the essentials they need to survive.
Ultimately, recognizing the value of limits in given contexts also turns the tables on critics who adopt an emancipatory political positioning that refuses any limits without consideration of context. By looking at how the abject appropriate citizenship to generate livable spaces for themselves, the current investigation points incisively to the ways in which abject people — and, by implication, all of us, who are abject in one way or another — are inevitably implicated in hypostatizing liberal hegemony even in resistant improvisation and subversive appropriation. One critical (and sobering) lesson I seek to elucidate in this book is thus the inevitable complicity and contamination of any performance of resistance — even the most radical kinds — in the material cycle of liberal social life. Yet I also wish to emphasize that the messy webs of complicity and contamination do not spell doom or futility; rather, they formulate the instrumental conduits to create circuitous and nonlinear processes of social change. This book thus sheds light on the perpetual tension between the immanent potentiality of social change and the inescapable circumscription of such change in liberal hegemony. It also further suggests that critical scholars and social activists may want to seize such tension as the foundation for expanding social transformation.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Ingenious Citizenship by Charles T. Lee. Copyright © 2016 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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