REVIEW
Does citizenship as an apparatus of government rely on ‘progress’ as a technology of power?
Koen Slootmaeckers, City St George’s, University of London
I come to Isin’s book Citizenship not as a scholar who has worked on citizenship or usually engages with theories on the subject matter, but rather as someone who has worked most of his career focusing on social boundaries and the ways in which states engage with LGBTQ rights to include or exclude sexual minorities from their polity. As such, while perhaps the political theory the book is based on does not connect directly with my own academic lexicon, the story within the book and its arguments feels familiar. In fact, reading the book made me think, provided answers to some puzzles I have been dealing with for a while, and offered a language I did not know I needed.
It is this capacity to make one think and spark ideas that makes a great book. As such, instead of using this piece to unpack the theory of citizenship Isin postulates and weigh its pros and cons – something I find somewhat redundant given the compelling nature of the argument –, I believe it to be more productive to engage with the theory by demonstrating the ways in which it made me think as well as exploring some of the questions that the book sparked for me. So, in what follows I seek to think with Isin’s work and to ask questions to push the theorising further.
One of the first things I appreciate about the book is its long durée approach, as well as its process-orientated gaze (I would be tempted to even call it relational, in line with my own thinking). Rather than focusing on particular expressions of citizenship or ways we experience these, the book succeeds with brilliance and theoretical clarity in demonstrating that citizenship is an apparatus of government, that generates both processes of domination and emancipation, and of stability and change. Resisting the temptation to trace change throughout history, chapter one discusses the different fractures shaping citizenship as an apparatus of government (henceforth also citizenship apparatus). Doing so, it forces the reader to shift their focus from change (and ‘progress’) towards continuities across the 2500+ years (if not longer) history of citizenship. Doing so, Isin beautifully makes the processes and functioning of citizenship sensible and visible.
However, reading the book, I was left wondering how citizenship as an apparatus of government conceals itself? It is through this lingering question that the book spoke to my own thinking about the role of the idea of ‘progress’ in society – particularly our affective attachment to the idea of progress. Whilst reading the book provided me with insights and a language I had been looking for (as I hope to explain throughout), I kept asking myself the question how the citizenship apparatus sustains itself and continues to find ways to remain hidden in the deep shadows of control.
Indeed, if the apparatus generates in/stability and enables both domination and emancipation, one could consider the apparatus to be a fickle process. Yet, as Isin demonstrates, it is a rather resilient apparatus of government – one that transforms and persistently finds ways to conceal itself after acts of citizenship render it sensible and intelligible. There seems to be, as Isin argues, a persistent “instability where the apparatus must make itself sensible and intelligible in order to stabilise the situation and diffuse tension that arises from the instability. Thus, making citizenship as an apparatus of government sensible and intelligible renders the apparatus vulnerable, exposed and susceptible to provocation and even transformation” (p. 81).
‘Progress’ as the concealer of power?
Yet if it is plagued with persistent instability, why, then, do challenges to the apparatus only ever lead to transformation? Reading the book left me questioning whether it is possible to imagine a world in which we are not portioned, individuated and aggregated as means of control? And why is it so difficult for us to permanently expose the apparatus?
In other words, the core question I believe one should ask is what keeps us invested in the apparatus? What makes us content with perpetual moves of emancipation of ‘some’ into citizen-subjects (which always seem to come at the expense of the domination of other non-subjects)? If the “boundaries between citizens, strangers, outsiders, and aliens always change precisely because they are objects of struggles” (p.73) and these struggles are always already captured and anticipated (in their unpredictability?) by the apparatus, what keeps us content with the eternal struggle? Here, Isin provides some answers when he argues that “any apparatus requires coercion and sanctions but also support, adherence, legitimacy, belief and consensus” (p. 75). He offers valuable examples of the forces of the imaginary that sustain the apparatus, yet I could not help but wonder if a key one has been left out.
Through my own work, and by thinking through the resistance I received from activists and queer people alike when I challenge the idea of progress (Slootmaeckers, 2023), I have come to think that our attachments to the idea of progress and our need to feel things are improving seem to be performing a core political function within domination. They seem to make us blind to how citizenship as apparatus of government may transform but equally maintains its power structures to continue the processes of portioning, individuating and aggregating. For a while, I have been thinking about how the system is able to lull us in a false sense of progress to hide how the structures of power have not substantially changed (as Isin also convincingly argues throughout the book). It is here that the book sparked me to push our thinking on the role of progress in the maintenance of citizenship as apparatus of government. Can we consider progress not just as a force of the imaginary but instead as a technology of power;[1] a technology that enables the citizenship apparatus to remain concealed, even when challenged. If acts of citizenship make some parts of the apparatus visible, progress is what keeps the deep workings of the apparatus invisible; it is what prevents fights for emancipation becoming revolutionary – in the sense of preventing us to see alternatives outside the apparatus.
Let me explain. We live in a moment where we witness an intensification of what some would call the anti-democratic backlash as well as intense successes of the so-called anti-gender mobilisations to undo and transform how we think about the “progress” made with regards to gender and sexual equality (or citizenship). The way liberal parts of society have been caught by surprise by the successes of these movements has always been of interest to me – as it demonstrates some of the underlying imaginaries of how progress has been a guiding assumption within progressive movements. Indeed, as Isin writes, much of rights-based movements have implicitly been guided by the imagination that the “inscription of rights will bring about their realisation” under the assumption that “this inscription is also their guarantee” (p. 80). Indeed, in my own work, I found that “progress in law without a change in [people’s] lived experience remains hypothetical” (Slootmaeckers 2023, p. 14). However, such questioning of the “Myth of Rights” (Scheingold 2004), in my experience, prompts many people to quite defensively point out that things have progressed in the last several decades for queer people, for example. Such defensive arguments indeed align with the workings of citizenship as an apparatus of government in the sense that, as Isin writes, it “partitions time by constituting itself as the originary (modern) moment and disavows its past as ancient” (p. 107). And of course, I would not deny that there have been material improvements for some people – some queer subjects have been emancipated into a more beneficial place within the citizenship apparatus –, but to call it progress (which to me implies a fundamental/radical change in the system) is not accurate. Heteronormativity and its stranglehold on society, for example, have not changed much in terms of its power structures – and citizenship as apparatus of government remains very much in play.
Indeed, the history of the move from demands of queer liberation (a radical challenge to the system) towards a neoliberal approach of identity politics, for example, is one way in which the emancipation of some subjects (particularly the middle class white gay men) into citizenship has allowed the apparatus of government to continue dominating the queer subject that seeks to challenge its power structure. Thus, what I am postulating here – and in doing so seek to go in conversation with Isin’s work – is that the focus on the promise of the future, the focus on the staged process of emancipation hides the violences that have shaped the repression of those voices that challenge the system as a whole. Thus, it is through the promise of eventual emancipation by means of a gradual transformation that the citizenship apparatus is able to conceal its most vicious processes of domination. It ensures that challenges to the system can be pacified and keeps rights claims invested within existing structures of power. This “cruel optimism” (Berlant 2011) of progress then is what keeps all of us invested in the apparatus of government and what prevents radical structural ruptures to said apparatus.
Imagining Otherwise: Revolutionary Citizenship, Queer Politics, and Compassionate Curiosity
If the idea of progress functions as a technology of power within the apparatus of citizenship – concealing the apparatus by offering a perpetual promise of emancipation –, then what would it mean to enact a rupture that is not simply within the apparatus but one that reimagines life outside of it? Can we imagine a way to undo the apparatus of citizenship itself, or at least the domination inherent to it? Isin gestures towards this in his discussion of revolutionary citizenship, which he distinguishes from routine, recognised, or even disruptive acts of citizenship. Revolutionary acts, in his account, are not merely about inclusion into an existing political order, but about the invention of new subjectivities and new orders. They carry the potential to transform the very conditions of political being. Yet, as Isin is acutely aware, such acts are rare, risky, and often co-opted back into the apparatus through the very processes of recognition and legitimisation they resist (as I discussed above about the queer liberation movement’s transition into a LGBT rights movement).
It is because of this that I agree that a shift from the focus on ‘progress’ to one on continuity (as Isin engages in his book) can help us to unsettle and perhaps permanently destabilise the citizenship apparatus. If we embrace the queer politics of the ceaseless interrogation of power as advanced by Cathy Cohen (1997), perhaps we can shine a permanent spotlight on those processes of domination of the apparatus that work hard to remain concealed. Indeed, Cohen’s call for a radical queer politics, that attends to the multiple axes of power structuring marginality and refuses the narrowing of queer politics to respectable, recognisable identities, mirrors Isin’s insistence that truly political acts are those that defy intelligibility within existing grammars of governmentality. Cohen calls for us to always examine how the gains made for some always generate new power structures and forces of domination. Her queer politics thus prefigures revolutionary citizenship by foregrounding the unintelligible, intersectional, and coalitional dimensions of political life that the apparatus seeks to suppress.
But if revolutionary citizenship is to avoid becoming yet another abstraction, another empty signifier of resistance, we must also ask: how do we cultivate the conditions under which revolutionary acts can emerge, be sustained, and avoid capture? This is where I would like to offer some speculative ideas about a new political engagement that I currently seek to theorise as the ‘politics of compassionate curiosity’ and how it may relate to Isin’s compelling work. Whilst I do not intend to unpack these politics here, the point to which it becomes useful in the discussion of Isin’s work is that it seeks to resist the foundational divide and conquer processes of citizenship as an apparatus of government. If the dominating power of citizenship rests in the portioning, individuating and aggregating logics of the apparatus, then perhaps a new politics that seeks to emphasise the radical power of connection and understanding across fractures may be a way to short-circuit the power structures of citizenship. Creating affective and ethical spaces in which new solidarities and political imaginaries might be formed (not rooted in the individual rights-based approaches, but instead in shared struggle), can perhaps have the potential to not just disrupt domination, but to offer a permanent rupture away from the apparatus.
Such type of politics can then be seen as a disposition necessary for uncaptured acts of disrupting citizenship, not as a formal act but as a relational orientation of connection. I hope it invites us to connect our own struggles against domination with those we encounter along the way. It resists the cruel optimism of progress by refusing to believe that recognition or inclusion will ever be enough. And most importantly, it allows us to remain open to the idea that a different world is not only possible, but already being enacted in the small, quiet, and unruly acts of those who refuse to be governed in the ways they are told they must be.
To return to the book, then, Citizenship is not just a powerful theoretical contribution; it is an invitation, as I tried to show here, to think differently about what it means to be political, to be governed, and to act. It is a text that enables, provokes, and unsettles. My hope is that by thinking with Isin, we can begin to imagine what the world might look like if we engage in the ongoing practice of refusal, of relational becoming, and of radical imagination with the aim to not find new emancipations within the apparatus of government but instead short-circuit its dominating power structures.
[1] Or a modality of governmentality – I am not sure yet, but I believe this is where a fruitful conversation is to be had.