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June 11, 2006
The link below is courtesy of Fadzilah over at Ostrich Looking For Sand.
The Migration and Diaspora Study Group Seminar at the National University of Singapore recently hosted a talk by Prof. Aihwa Ong entitled, 'Mutations in Citizenship'. The abstract states:
Mutations in citizenship are crystallized in an ever-shifting landscape shaped by the flows of markets, technologies, and populations. We are moving beyond the citizenship-versus-statelessness model. First, the elements of citizenship (rights, entitlements, etc.) are becoming disarticulated from each other, and becoming re-articulated with universalizing criteria of neoliberalism and human rights. Such "global assemblages" define zones of political entitlements and claims. Second, the space of the "assemblage," rather than the national terrain, becomes the site for political mobilizations by diverse groups in motion. Three contrasting configurations are presented: the EU zone; Asian zones of hypergrowth, and camps of the disenfranchised. Thus, particular constellations shape specific problems and resolutions to questions of contemporary living, further disarticulating and deterritorializing aspects of citizenship.
This Deleuzian account ( 'flows,' 'assemblages', 'deterritorializing') sounds interesting, and the way it concentrates on the forms of social change taking place alongside or beneath the given form of the state connects with Arendt and Agamben's arguments about rights, refugees, citizenship and the camps of the disenfranchised. Does the process of the deterritorializing' of citizenship and becoming minor constitute the core of a revolutionary politics? Does it mean the invention of new forms of subjectivity and new forms of connection between deterritorized elements of the social and political field?
The back drop to these mutations is Karl Marx's observation in the nineteenth century that capitalism had opened up fractures and fissures in the solid crust of European society:----"Beneath the apparently solid surface, they betray oceans of liquid matter, only needing expansion to rend into fragments continents of hard rock." Marx and Friedrich Engels's famous phrase, "all that is solid melts into air" captures the constant political and cultural upheavals that characterized global modernity. Today, the ruptures and upheavals continue to be associated with contradictory globalizing phenomena. The interplay between them threatens to render modern norms of citizenship and human rights "antiquated before they can ossify".
Fadzilah attended the seminar and she offers some comments here. These highlight the way that Singapore illustrates Ong's argument in relation to the Asian zones of hypergrowth. Fadzilah says that:
Singapore has been affected by a strong sense of economic globalization such that 'talent', foreign and local, has been flowing in and out, the latter better known as a 'brain-drain'. 'Foreign talent' in Singapore are offered the same privileges as Singapore citizens in many areas, thus rendering citizenship less of a sought-after privilege. Similarly highly qualified Singaporeans who leave are granted attractive incentives in the nations they migrate to.
Singapore's mode of governance is not just designed to position Singapore to compete in the global economy, since the amalgam of neoliberal strategies of governing are re-engineering political spaces and populations to position Singapore as a hub of scientific expertise (biotechnology) and flexible labor and knowledge regimes.
Ong develops this in this article entitled, 'Experiments with Freedom: Milieus of the Human', where she says that:
The new norm of belonging to "Asian world cities" is not as a citizen who makes demands on the government but as individuals who take the initiative as mobile, flexible, and reflexive actors responding autonomously to market forces. There is thus a shift in the ethics of citizenship, from a stress on equal access to rights and claims on the state to a focus on individual obligation to maximize self-interest in turbulent economic conditions. Responsible citizenship is to be enacted in autonomous actions of individual self-enterprise and risk taking, without state support. In addition, there is the requirement of self-enterprising citizens to interact with technological systems and to remake themselves as reflexive knowledge workers.
That is also happening in Australia as the welfare state is rolled back and we citizens are required become more self-reliant. But Singapore is much more into advanced in terms of neo-liberal governance:
Despite having a population of four million that is already onequarter expatriate, Singapore has an aggressive headhuntng programthat recruits experts in all fields in order to make it "a fertile ground for breeding creativity" .... Talented expatriates enjoy better salaries, housing allowances, and preferential tax breaks than run-of-the-mill citizens. Consequently, the problems of living, working, and productivity increasingly pivot around individual self-actualizing talent rather than conventional citizenship claims. The influx of exciting, risk-taking, and creative foreigners, it is hoped, will shake up narrowly trained, security conscious citizens constrained by Confucian norms and group thinking. Neoliberal ethics trump Confucian ethics as governing technologies seek to animate self-governing subjects who can make calculated investments in their lives for uncertain times. The moral measures of citizens, expatriates, and habitués of globalized sites are now set spinning by the gyrations in global markets. Residents in such globalized sites are valued and protected not because of their citizenship status but for their powers of self-management and cutting-edge skills that sustain the competitiveness of growth zones.
In her account Fadzilah says nothing about Ong's comments about the camps of the becoming-disenfranchised at the seminar. Are these camps filled with refugees? Aslyum seekers? Illegal immigrants? Is there any link to becoming-revolutionary in the assemblages of the flows of markets, technologies, and populations?
Ong has written a book on the mutations of citizenship which constructs neoliberalism as an malleable technology of governance that is taken up in different ways by different regimes, be they authoritarian, democratic, or communist. I'll hunt around for some reviews.
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Dear Mr. Sour,
This is a sick joke, right?
The abstract of the lecture is one of the grossest examples of "anglia convoluta" that I've read in a long time.
Of course, being a professor at UC Berkeley explains the lack of expertise in the English Language but I also think that one can only gain respect in that crowd by being as unclear as possible.
The "professor" could simply have stated that new economic patterns may affect the present concept of citizenship. However, that would be too simple and bring contempt on the writer.