Proximity by design? Affective citizenship and the management of unease

Abstract

‘Community cohesion’ is the preferred framework for managing ‘race relations’ and ‘conflict’ in contemporary Britain. Initially adopted in government policy following civil disturbances in the summer of 2001, ‘community cohesion’ combined visions of shared belonging with strategies of managing diversity. More recent versions still place a strong emphasis on ideas of shared belonging but these are combined with strategies of managing migration and identity which are deployed in view of securing local communities against threats posed by extremism, deprivation, diversity and feelings of ‘white unease’. This article examines how the community cohesion agenda relies on strategies of governance that seek to design particular kinds of human behaviours such as ‘mixing’ and ‘meaningful interaction’, in view of ‘delivering’ cohesion in the community. I analyse the cohesion agenda as a form of governance that operates through mechanisms of subjectivation. However, instead of privileging the responsible, discerning, rational, autonomous ‘free subject’, I argue that community cohesion is a form of ‘governing through affect’ that draws on and targets the affective subject for certain strategies and regulations aimed at designing people's behaviours and attitudes in the public domain.

Keywords:

• citizenship
• affect
• community cohesion
• governance
• white unease

Acknowledgements

Several versions of this article were presented at various events where I benefited from engaged and valuable responses that have helped me immensely in refining the arguments presented here. I also wish to thank Sue Penna, Linda Pietrantonio, Cynthia Weber, Anna Webster and two anonymous reviewers for their detailed comments on earlier drafts of this article. An early version of this paper was developed during a visiting fellowship at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Citizenship and Minorities (CIRCEM), at the University of Ottawa, Canada.

Notes

 1. Demos is an independent think tank and research institute believed to have influenced the policies of Tony Blair's government, and is considered a centre of ‘Third Way politics’.

 2. For a critical overview of research practices and assumptions of contact theory, see Dixon et al. (2005).

 3. Many thanks to Sue Penna for drawing my attention to this point.

 4. Community cohesion is not the first New Labour strategy of governing through affect. Earlier examples include Blair's ‘Respect’ agenda or the focus on the ‘fear of crime’ in the criminal justice agenda, which has become as significant a policy issue as crime itself.

 5. The Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia.

 6. Where I depart from Isin is that I consider the subject's ‘affective structure’ as not always already contained within the Freudian psychic structure that Isin draws on, where neurosis is an inescapable state of being whereby the human psyche is perpetually caught up in the conflicting demands of its three agencies: the id, the ego and the superego. Anxiety is the foundational affect of the neurotic subject who never fulfils her desires and never attains the ideals of wholesomeness that are posited as ‘normalcy’ (Isin 2004, p. 223). Isin argues that in the context of risk societies and cultures of fear, the neurotic subject acts in response to insecurities it faces in its pursuit of absolute tranquillity, security, safety, and so on. However, my concern is that the emphasis on neuropolitics risks reproducing Freud's totalising tendency to situate our psychic structure on the neurosis-psychosis continuum. In addition, by reading the economy, the body, the environment, the network, the home, the border, human rights as all neuroticised, I fear that Isin is emptying neurosis of its meaning.

 7. I am not suggesting that this is new. The ways in which individuals conduct themselves and manage their feelings in their private lives were subject to governance strategies in the nineteenth century European state (c.f. Foucault 1990), as well as colonising states (Stoler 2002). Stoler documents how personal relationships can impact of people's national attachment. But, as I show below, the cohesion agenda addresses individual's feelings and behaviour in and about the public, shared world they inhabit, rather than being concerned with individuals' behaviours in the private domain.

 8. Up until 2006, a cohesive community was one where, among other things, ‘The diversity of people's backgrounds and circumstances are [sic] appreciated and positively valued.’ (CIC 2007b, p. 40)

 9. It is unclear how Eastern Europeans figure here, and if they are conceived as ‘ethnics’ or not. To be sure, their presence troubles the historically racialised definition of ethnicity used in British public policy. It remains to be seen how that will pan out. In addition, how faith communities figure in the governance of affect is beyond the scope of this article. But the point that I wish to emphasise here is how the affective citizens is conceived in generic terms that disregard any forms of attachment or investment to ‘ethnic’ or religious communities.

10. For more information on the case and on SBS, see http://www.southallblacksisters.org.uk/ [Accessed 17 July 2008].

11. See http://www.southallblacksisters.org.uk/savesbs.htm [Accessed 17 July 2008].