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Abstract
This paper explores the relations between ordinariness and citizenship processes along two different lines. It first aims at empirically exploring certain uses of ordinariness as a political category. While it is often used as a depoliticisation tool, the two case studies analysed here underline on the contrary its politicising potential. In a second, briefer, part, it proposes a discussion of the gains to be obtained in citizenship studies, from using ordinariness as a category of analysis. Approaching citizenship processes ‘from the ordinary’ is a fruitful perspective from which the political dimensions of usually unseen or unheard practices and sites can be grasped. What connects the two discussions presented here is the complex and paradoxical relationship the two categories of ordinariness and politics entertain, both empirically and analytically.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Such distance would provide yet another valued quality they are endowed with: the fact they would ‘represent’ nobody but themselves.
2. Indeed, the legitimacy of ‘ordinary citizens’ to participate is often seen as flowing from their direct knowledge of local issues, what is usually described in France as expertise d'usage (user expertise).
3. Mariot uses the English word ‘freaks’ in the original French text. All translations from the French are by the author.
4. Clarke (Citation2010) stresses the extent to which calling upon ‘ordinary citizens’ can be a powerful depoliticisation device.
5. Both fieldworks used in this paper were realised in Tours (a city of circa 140,000 inhabitants in the Loire Valley) between 2003 and 2006. In both cases, long-term participant observation of meetings and events was used, as well as interviews with CVL members and DDLR participants; fieldwork on the CVLs was done in cooperation with H. Bertheleu (University François Rabelais, Tours).
6. Together with those of professionals and of elected councillors.
7. A paradoxical observation when one considers these ‘ordinary citizens’ are called upon precisely because they are not supposed to be involved in such groups.
8. To that extent, they are thus close to yet another figure of the ‘ordinary citizen’: that of the ‘good one’, who complies with its expected duties (see Neveu Citation2013).
9. ‘Inhabitants’ were selected by a draft among individuals having explicitly expressed their willingness to participate in CVLs.
10. WT: West Tours; the four CVLs were named after their geographic position: West, East, North and South.
11. For instance, one participant in DDLR, a movement discussed below, stressed that: ‘in a movement, I need to be recognised as a person, as an interesting person. In [other] movements, I'm not recognised as such /…/ DDLR is a form of claiming that is not directed towards elected representatives, or the power, but from oneself to oneself (de soi sur soi-même)’ (Female participant, notes of DDLR preparatory meeting).
12. Other dimensions of CVL members' representations confirm the need for such a contextualised approach of experiences; they thus admitted elected councillors could entertain a patronage relation with their constituency, but not within the (supposedly) participatory scene of CVLs (see Bertheleu and Neveu Citation2005).
13. Yet, another way to define ‘the ordinary’ and thus the supposedly ‘non-political’.
14. This discrepancy in expectations produced different reactions, among which defection and irony were not the less used.
15. Literally ‘Let's debate on the streets’, but in French this name has strong assonances with the expression ‘des bâtons dans les roues’ which means ‘putting sticks in wheels (spokes)’, i.e. disrupting a process.
16. After a first edition in 2005 organised by STAJ (an association mainly involved in youth workers' training), the 2006 edition's planning and conception gathered a diversity of individuals, mostly youth in their twenties or early thirties, from a diversity of backgrounds (in most cases with some kind of higher education experience, not necessarily completed) but sharing precarious job positions or unemployment.
17. FNAC is a national brand of ‘cultural supermarket’ whose shops usually include a ‘forum’, i.e. a space where authors can meet their public. Reclaiming this (private commercial) space as an actual forum (public space for discussion) was a strong objective for DDLR's organisers. Such an attention paid to reclaiming the political meaning of words is a constant characteristic of movements belonging to the tradition of éducation populaire.
18. Such a will to re-occupy the urban space as a space for encounters and debates was not only enacted during the Festival itself; when weather allowed, participants were also organising the planning meetings outside, in parks or on buildings' staircases.
19. A public space that is not just a metaphoric one, but is conceived of as an actual space, made of streets and squares. Another DDLR project was to mark with painting the ‘privatised’ parts of what looked like public spaces. For more details about the centrality of spatial dimensions of citizenship, see Staeheli et al. (Citation2012) and Clarke et al. (Citation2013).
20. The very functioning of such institutions would make it impossible to reconcile their requirements and conceptions with those of collective movements. Complying with the framing of issues and stakes by funding bodies (even in a critical and instrumental manner) would have deep effects on projects and their political meanings; for more examples of such processes, see Neveu (Citation1999, Citation2003). As for trade unions and other ‘institutionalised’ groups, they are seen as trapped in rigid certainties that forbid them to actually adopt a position of true debate, to listen and question themselves.
21. Generally organised on a voluntary basis by local inhabitants, these dinners gather neighbours for a shared meal that takes place in the street; these informal dinners can, or not, be organised on the ‘official’ ‘neighbours day’.
22. All encounters with the police, described as ‘intercultural encounters’, went smoothly.
23.Vélorutions take place in a growing number of cities; they are ‘demonstrations’ on bikes claiming for a new model of urban circulation and life. See, for instance, http//:www.velorution.org
24. Such conceptions are part of a wider mode of political action particularly developed in anti-globalisation groups (as well as more recent ‘new new social movements’ such as Occupy or Indignados) resorting to different forms of public actions and demonstrations. While not explicitly claiming their connection with such movements, some DDLR members referred on several occasions to them. But it should be observed that such practices in France have even more ‘ancient’ roots in the empowering project of mouvements d'éducation populaire (Pujol Citation2005), in which many DDLR organisers were trained.
25. DDLR members organised several apéritifs in laundromats: ‘I think these projects stood out for people, who thought “it's amazing what you can do in simplicity”; what we bring is simplicity, that is, if you feel like talking with your neighbours, you can, and that's a very simple project’ (notes of DDLR preparatory meeting).
26. As mentioned earlier, the roots of such an approach are mainly to be found in mouvements d'éducation populaire, where some of the more active members of DDLR were trained themselves. Some of its more radical forms tend to re-emerge today, alongside community organising or empowerment practices, for instance among community centres (Neveu Citation2014). On the history of éducation populaire, see among others Pujol (Citation2005) and Lebon (Citation2005).
27. Entering into a detailed discussion of the situational, contextual, relational and processual character of citizenship is beyond the scope of this paper (for developments, see Clarke et al. Citation2013; Isin Citation2009; Neveu Citation2013).
28. Overney's approach is consistent with Rancière's definition of politics (see Rancière Citation1995).
29. ‘Taking up the definition of the “small” by Laplantine, small politics is not the opposite of the far away but of the haughty in its etymological sense: a judgment from afar, from above, towering (Laplantine, 2003)’ (Overney Citation2014).
30. CVL members and DDLR participants both in their own way questioned such established legitimacies. In the first case, the ascribed legitimacy of (and injunction to act as) ‘non-political’ individuals, and, in the second, the legally defined legitimate uses of public space.
31. Such ‘ordinary legitimacies’ are those that lie ‘outside the realms of the usually agreed legitimacy – those of power or competences’. This proposal could in a way be connected to Rancière's (Citation1995) analysis of ‘la part des sans-part’, the share of those who have no share because they do not have money, knowledge or rank (Citation1995).