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Abstract
This essay calls for a reorientation in scholarly approaches to civic engagement from asking questions of what to asking questions of how. I advance a discourse theory of citizenship as a mode of public engagement. Attending to modalities of citizenship recognizes its fluid and quotidian enactment and considers action that is purposeful, potentially uncontrollable and unruly, multiple, and supportive of radical but achievable democratic practices. Citizenship engagement may be approached through potential foci of generativity, risk, commitment, creativity, and sociability. A discourse theory reformulates the relationship between citizenship and citizen, reveals differences in enactments of citizenship, and calls attention to hybrid cases of citizenship.
Notes
Robert Asen is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric at the University of Wisconsin‐Madison. Correspondence to: Communication Arts, Vilas Hall, 821 University Avenue, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706‐1412. U.S. Email: [email protected]. The author thanks Gerard Hauser, Raymie McKerrow, Darrin Hicks, Stephen Lucas, Susan Zaeske, and Erik Doxtader for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this article. A portion of this article was presented at the 2003 Alta Conference on Argumentation.
Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 45, 60–64. See also Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). For an overview of these debates, see Civic Engagement in American Democracy, ed. Theda Skocpol and Morris P. Fiorina (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1999).
Putnam, Bowling Alone, 341.
National Commission on Civic Renewal, A Nation of Spectators: How Civic Disengagement Weakens America and What We Can Do about It (College Park, MD: National Commission on Civic Renewal, 1998),http://www.puaf.umd.edu/Affiliates/CivicRenewal/finalreport/table_of_contentsfinal_report.htm. See also Robert K. Fullinwider, ed., Civil Society, Democracy, and Civic Renewal (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999).
Matthew Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg, Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined Its Citizens and Privatized Its Public (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 21.
Everett Carll Ladd, The Ladd Report (New York: Free Press, 1999), 31–43, 49–52.
Carmen Sirianni and Lewis Friedland, Civic Innovation in America: Community Empowerment, Public Policy, and the Movement for Civic Renewal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 17. See also Francesca Polletta, Freedom Is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
Robert Wuthnow, Loose Connections: Joining Together in America's Fragmented Communities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 31–57.
My reference to an “investigative tendency” is meant to indicate a prevalent approach to civic engagement, not an all‐encompassing perspective. For an exception to this approach, see Gerard A. Hauser, “Rhetorical Democracy and Civic Engagement,” in Rhetorical Democracy: Discursive Practices of Civic Engagement, ed. Gerard A. Hauser and Amy Grim (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004), 1–14.
This is not a methodological point. Citizenship may be studied usefully from both social scientific and humanistic perspectives. My reference to counting refers to the question “what counts as citizenship?” which, as I argue in this essay, unfortunately directs our attention to acts of citizenship and away from action.
Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003), 226.
A discourse theory signals an affiliation with theoretical efforts to conceptualize the public sphere as a social space created through discourse. From this perspective, specific sites may host public spheres, but these sites are not identical with the public sphere per se. For example, see Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1996); Gerard A. Hauser, Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999); Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002).
Daniel C. Brouwer, “ACT‐ing UP in Congressional Hearings,” in Counterpublics and the State, ed. Robert Asen and Daniel C. Brouwer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 87–109.
Susan Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery, and Women's Political Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
Michael Warner, “The Mass Public and the Mass Subject,” in The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 234–256.
Ronald Walter Greene, “Citizenship in a Global Context: Towards a Future Beginning for a Cultural Studies Inspired Argumentation Theory,” in Arguing Communication and Culture, ed. G. Thomas Goodnight (Washington, DC: National Communication Association, 2002), 100–101.
For an engaging discussion of these issues, see James Bohman, “Citizenship and Norms of Publicity: Wide Public Reason in Cosmopolitan Societies,” Political Theory 27 (1999): 176–202.
See, for example, Linda Hutcheon, “The Politics of Representation,” Signature: A Journal of Theory and Canadian Literature 1 (1989): 23–44.
See, for example, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “The Discursive Performance of Femininity: Hating Hilary,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 (1998): 1–19; Catherine Helen Palczewski, “Cyber‐movements, New Social Movements, and Counterpublics,” in Counterpublics and the State, ed. Robert Asen and Daniel C. Brouwer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 161–186; Kent Ono and John Sloop, “The Critique of Vernacular Discourse,” Communication Monographs 62 (1995): 19–42.
Amy Gutmann, Identity in Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).
Iris Marion Young, “Difference as a Resource for Democratic Communication,” in Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics, ed. James Bohman and William Rehg (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1997), 389.
Rita Felski, Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 127.
Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public (1925; reprint, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1993), 28.
Lippmann, Phantom Public, 14.
Lippmann, Phantom Public, 29.
The invocation of Dewey in this portion of my argument is meant as an inspiration, not a necessary component of theorizing citizenship as a mode of public engagement. I am not advocating Dewey's theory of citizenship.
John Dewey, “Creative Democracy—the Task Before Us,” in The Later Works, 1925–1953. Volume 14: 1939–1941, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 226. For further discussions of Dewey's views on democracy, see Robert Asen, “The Multiple Mr. Dewey: Multiple Publics and Permeable Borders in John Dewey's Theory of the Public Sphere,” Argumentation and Advocacy 39 (2003): 174–188; William Caspary, Dewey on Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000); Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).
Dewey, “Creative Democracy,” 225.
John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (1927; reprint, Athens, OH: Swallow Press, 1954), 148.
Dewey, “Creative Democracy,” 227.
Dewey, Public and Its Problems, 152.
John Dewey, “The Basic Values and Loyalties of Democracy,” in The Later Works, 1925–1953. Volume 14: 1939–1941, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 275.
Dewey, Public and Its Problems, 183.
Dewey, Public and Its Problems, 183.
See John Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1935); John Dewey, Experience and Nature (Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 1925).
Dewey, “Creative Democracy,” 228.
Dewey, Public and Its Problems, 148. See also John Dewey, “Democracy Is Radical,” in The Later Works, 1925–1953. Volume 11: 1935–1937, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 299.
My suggestion that scholars may wish to defer the question of constitution represents a change in my perspective. In a recent Alta paper, I identified these foci as constitutive qualities of citizenship. See Robert Asen, “Notes on a Discourse Theory of Citizenship” in Critical Problems in Argumentation (13th NCA/AFA Conference on Argumentation, Alta, Utah, August 2003), ed. Charles Willard (forthcoming, 2004). I have since come to the conclusion that identifying constitutive qualities of citizenship almost invariably leads to typological discussions of whether a specific practice is or is not an act of citizenship, which raises the problems of counting citizenship.
Along these lines, Darrin Hicks holds that a key promise of models of deliberative democracy is a promise of inclusion, which is an important basis of legitimacy. Darrin Hicks, “The Promise(s) of Deliberative Democracy,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 5 (2002): 224–229. See also John Dryzek, “Legitimation and Economy in Deliberative Democracy,” Political Theory 29 (2001): 651–669.
Alcoff and Gray call for continued engagement to “transform arrangements of speaking to create spaces where survivors are authorized to be both witnesses and experts, both reporters of experience and theorists of experience. Such transformations will alter existing subjectivities as well as structures of domination and relations of power.” Linda Alcoff and Laura Gray, “Survivor Discourse: Transgression or Recuperation?” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 18 (1993): 287.
Kathryn M. Olson and G. Thomas Goodnight, “Entanglements of Consumption, Cruelty, Privacy, and Fashion: The Social Controversy over Fur,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 80 (1994): 249–276.
Quoted in John Butler, “Carol Moseley‐Braun's Day to Talk about Race: A Study of Forum in the United States Senate,” Argumentation and Advocacy 32 (1995): 70. The details of this debate are more complicated than I have sketched in this paragraph. For a fuller account as well as a trenchant analysis, see Butler's article.
On the connections between deliberation and trust, see Gerard A. Hauser and Chantal Benoit‐Barne, “Reflections on Rhetoric, Deliberative Democracy, Civil Society, and Trust,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 5 (2002): 261–275.
Along these lines, Gerard Hauser holds that “for democracy to be a functional form of governance in a society of strangers, citizens must learn how to engage difference in a way that recognizes the individual and the group as a subject.” Hauser, “Rhetorical Democracy,” 10. See also Linda Alcoff, “The Problem of Speaking for Others,” Cultural Critique 20 (1991–1992): 5–32; Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 25–73; Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 249–280.
See Robert Asen, “Toward a Normative Conception of Difference in Public Deliberation,” Argumentation and Advocacy 35 (1999): 115–129; Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992), 26–38; Thomas McCarthy, “Practical Discourse: On the Relation of Morality to Politics,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1992), 51–72.
In light of my previous claim that the foci for approaching citizenship engagement need not be treated as an inseparable set, it may be useful to identify this sentence as a recommendation for scholarly inquiry. As I argue in this paragraph, holding risk and commitment in tension represents more dynamically the modality of citizenship than focusing on one or the other.
On the value of play as a framework for studying communicative practices, see Catherine Helen Palczewski, “Argument in an Off Key: Playing with the Productive Limits of Argument,” in Arguing Communication and Culture, ed. G Thomas Goodnight (Washington, DC: National Communication Association, 2002), 1–23.
The critical power of play has been widely studied. See, for example, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “The ‘Blackness of Blackness’: A Critique of the Sign and the Signifying Monkey,” Critical Inquiry 9 (1983): 685–723; Tyler Hoffman, “Treacherous Laughter: The Poetry Slam, Slam Poetry, and the Politics of Resistance,” Studies in American Humor 3 (2001): 49–64; Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1989); Robert E. Terrill, “Irony, Silence, and Time: Frederick Douglass on the Fifth of July,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89 (2003): 216–234.
An analysis of Andrew's Web site could compose a journal article. I mention it here as a brief illustration of how citizenship engagement may be explored for its creative expression. See http://www.jobsforjohn.com
See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991); Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1989); Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth‐Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).
Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (1961; reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 220–221.
Ronald Beiner, Political Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 132.
Arendt, Between Past and Future, 221.
On the limits of perspective‐taking, see Iris Marion Young, “Asymmetrical Reciprocity: On Moral Respect, Wonder, and Enlarged Thought,” Constellations 3 (1997): 340–363.
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “citizenship,” www.dictionary.oed.com/entrance.dtl
For an introduction to various theories of citizenship, see Ronald Beiner, ed., Theorizing Citizenship (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995); David Held, Models of Democracy, 2nd ed. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996). For histories of citizenship practices in the U.S., see Michael Schudson, The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). For an explication of citizenship in a European context, see T. H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class (1950; reprint, London: Pluto Press, 1992). For a global perspective, see T. K. Oommen, ed., Citizenship and National Identity: From Colonialism to Globalism (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1997).
My example highlights economic differences, but one could examine as usefully the ways that (frequently related) differences in race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and other areas inform enactments of citizenship. For an insightful collection of essays addressing connections between citizenship and gender, see Kathleen B. Jones, ed., “Special Issue: Citizenship in Feminism: Identity, Action, Locale,” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 12 (1997): 1–197.
Kevin Phillips, Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich (New York: Broadway Books, 2002), 114–138.
Paul Krugman, “For Richer: How the Permissive Capitalism of the Boom Destroyed American Equality,” New York Times Magazine, 20 October 2002, 67, 76.
Scott Keeler, Cliff Zukin, Molly Andolina, and Krista Jenkins, The Civic and Political Health of the Nation: A Generational Portrait (College Park, MD: The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, 2002), 20. Néstor García Canclini holds that changes in the public and private qualities of everyday cultural consumption indicate a “fundamental change in the conditions for the practice of a new type of civic responsibility.” This opportunity arises from the increased accountability entailed in contemporary consumption. García Canclini explains that “if consumption was once a site of more or less unilateral decisions, it is today a space of interaction where producers and senders no longer simply seduce their audience; they also have to justify themselves rationally.” Néstor García Canclini, Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 45, 39. For a contrary perspective, see Juliet Schor, Do Americans Shop Too Much? ed. Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000).