°Politizen
Grant Farred, “Foreigners Among Citizens” (Cultural Critique 67, 2007), on the politizen, Clichy DuBois and Cronulla:
The politizen: that figure whose name and whose acts mark the limits of citizenship. The “politizen” derives the “prefix,” “politi,” which constitutes the preponderance of its name from “politics,” its capacity to act in or against, to disrupt, the normative functioning of the political, to announce itself, from unexpected moment to unexpected moment, as Other to the political; its “suffix,” “zen,” is a critique of its status as “citizen,” which signals nothing so much as its preconcious affiliation to/with the nation; here it is always only the political crisis that separates the citizen from the not-citizen—from the invocation of its other pejorative names: “Arab,” “Muslim,” “beur,” “black,” or worse. Its very name, “politizen,” then, compels us to engage repeatedly with the politics of citizenship, with the often brutal delimitations of citizenship. The politizen is a politizen because it is not, or, more accurately, is never, afforded the full rights of citizenship — the politizen is the response to what it is denied, because of race or ethnicity, as citizen. FollowingWalter Benjamin’s critique of civilization and barbarism, we might suggest that every instance of the citizen is simultaneously a “document” of the politizen’s (often repeated) struggle against its disenfranchisement.
However, the politizen, at best an occasional, always an unpredictable actor within the political, is distinct from the revolutionary or even the activist because it is a figure who enters — intrudes on might be the more accurate phrasing — the political sporadically. Furthermore, it is capable of withdrawing equally unexpectedly and for long periods of time. The distinguishing feature of the politizen is, for this reason, not its activity but its dormancy: it rarely acts when acted against, even in extreme instances, which is also, paradoxically, its singular advantage: the citizen never knows, can never know, what stirs the politizen into life; neither the citizen nor the state is ever sure if, or when, the politizen will erupt into the political. The politizen’s lack of “political characteristics,” organization, party structure, trade union membership, constitutes its signal advantage: it is the political actor that disrupts the political and then retreats into, if not its “foreignness,” then certainly its circumscribed citizenship. The politizen can, in this way, never be known except that it is always known in, for, and through its unpredictability. The politizen is never to be confused with the subaltern or the mob. The politizen is decidedly not the subaltern because it does not performa series of political acts that are informed by the intention to reform or seize the state. Unlike the mob, the politizen knows, in so far as it is possible, its actions; grasps, even sometimes only intuitively, why it acts, and it knows that its eruptions will never constitute a sustained or prolonged action.
Read it, here as a pdf.
pomful of thanks for this..
will write back after reading it.
pomegranade [December 11, 2007 @ 1:44 am]
Do.
I’d neglected to put it up earlier, amidst all the moving around and such … It would be good to hear your take.
I also put up another of his essays (that I posted about some time ago, but not uploaded) here.
s0metim3s [December 11, 2007 @ 2:00 am]
I ditto the thanks. Just read the article (and reread the article on the not-yet counterpartisan, which seems to me a good companion piece, for good measure). Really like the concept of the politizen, which I kept thinking in relation to the event, or different conceptions of the event. The politizen’s sporadic intrusion is not an exceptional subtraction but a strategic incursion linked to other possible impetuses. Such intrusion responds to the event but doesn’t (as, e.g., the revolutionary does) bind itself to it or either enact or allow itself to be overcome by de/stratifications (which isn’t to say it’s necessarily free of reterritorializations, e.g., mateship, in Farred’s example)…. Or something along those lines.
Eric [December 11, 2007 @ 4:39 pm]