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 

And what if Rome once more conquered the revolution? 
-- Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended

 

This essay asks how the political identity and the domain of civic practice we refer to by the term citizenship is 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 essay has served as the occasion to pursue a rather particular, eclectic trajectory through a limited body of historical and critical work that compels my own thinking on this question. It is, unabashedly, both a prolonged and a preliminary meditation -- a chance to follow through on a line of thought that has emerged for me piecemeal, in graduate classrooms and conference halls, even as I know that I will not arrive. If nothing else, I hope to pressure the relation between subjects and citizens in the context of neo-liberal governance. 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 (e.g., flexible), 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's 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 in this essay is to hold open the question of whether "citizens" and "citizenship" outlives its modern conditions of possibility and, especially, the related question of what claims we can make for (and about) it -- 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."