ABSTRACT
The broad question motivating this discussion – ‘What’s left of citizenship?’ – fits well with the general rhetoric of globalization, and the propensity within this discourse to ask ‘what’s left’ of many things, be it sovereignty, authority, or even the political itself. To some extent, it plays to the preoccupation with prosaic debates about the re-entrenchment of sovereign power versus the withering away of the territorial state in light of the fluidities and simultaneities of contemporary political life. To ask ‘what’s left?’ is to suggest some process of decomposition, where the original ‘citizen’ or ‘sovereign’ or ‘authority’ has decayed, leaving the slightly recognizable carcass to be contorted to suit contemporary political ends. Particularly in light of the events of 11 September 2001 and its aftermath, this carcass of citizenship seems like the Iceman: withered, but preserved, skin stretched on bones, from which we weave myriad stories about the myth of origins, contemporary challenges, and future rearticulations. What was the Iceman’s last meal? Was he killed in a brutal struggle for supplies, territory, supremacy, or lost in an inclement storm? And, what might this mean for the mortality of contemporary humanity? Similarly, we ask what has happened to citizenship? Who or what is responsible for its demise? Is ‘what’s left’ sufficient for rising to one if not the fundamental political moment of inclusion and exclusion: the discrimination between friends and enemies? And finally, how does ‘what’s left’ manage the preservation
of rights and entitlements that is central to conventional citizenship with emerging forms of agency and citizenship/asylum politics? In this article, I contend that this carcass of citizenship is ‘identity manage-
ment’. Allegedly purged of the ugly politics of us and them, friends and enemies, inclusion and exclusion, the securitized, bureaucratized and ‘scientized’ realm of identity management – epitomized by the (impending) introduction of biometric technologies1 – provides a seemingly sanitary means of identifying/authenticating threats. In other words, through digitized fingerprints, facial recognition, retinal scans and so on, a ‘template’ is created and evaluated: threat or no threat. While the question of entitlement and rights, or what we might refer to as ‘citizenship practice’ (Wiener, 1998), does not melt away, the way in which contemporary citizenship or identity management conceptualizes and negotiates such challenges is novel. Beginning from Carl Schmitt’s contention that the political decision is the discrimination between friend and enemy, I contend that this shift from citizenship to identity management is at once both politicizing and depoliticizing. Identity management vis-à-vis biometrics attempts to transform citizenship into a quest for verifying/authenticating ‘identity’ for the purpose of access, to rights, bodies, spaces, etc., thus (purportedly) stripping away the cultural and ethnic attributes of citizenship. By concealing such matters in the technological and scientific discourses of biometrics, the ethnic/racial characteristics of contemporary citizenship practice – insofar as it is obsessed with restricting access to specific spaces, (i.e. airports) and rights (i.e. free movement) – are stripped away. Although knowledge of one’s identity is critical, the question of ‘authorizing access’, and thus, authenticating, becomes much greater in this epoch of ‘Homeland security’ and ‘domestic terrorists’. Contemplating what it means to speak of citizenship in terms of security,
the article begins with a brief discussion of securitization and broader critical understandings of security. It draws primarily on recent scholarship that connects the sovereign politics of the exception, and the challenge of what Michel Foucault refers to as ‘governing the whole state’ (quoted in Burke, 2002, p. 8), with questions of security and securitization. The analysis begins to consider the politicizing and depoliticizing impact that the introduction of biometric technologies has on the contemporary securitized politics of citizenship. In one sense, it would seem that identity management is ‘depoliticizing’ as it draws aspects of citizenship away from the spaces of conventional politics, towards sites of private authority and governmentalities. However, the resilience of political agency and the aggressive politics of inclusion/exclusion with its ethnic and racial framework suggests the move is equally politicizing. Following this, the article draws on Michael Williams’ recent work on securitization and the links to Carl Schmitt’s concept of the political. Here, Williams reinforces claims that the introduction of biometrics and the subsequent transformation of citizenship into identity management is intensely political, persistently fixed on the Schmittian discrimination between friends and enemies, merely disguising (or ‘sanitizing’) the exclusionist politics of citizenship and its connection with ‘sovereign discriminations’ (see Walker, 1999). Before concluding, the paper reflects on limits and
possibilities of political action/resistance, or what we might call ‘bio-agency’, in the context of identity management and contemporary post-September 11th politics of citizenship and migration.
