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Quarterly Journal of SpeechVol. 90, No. 2, May 2004, pp. 189–211

A Discourse Theory of CitizenshipRobert Asen

This essay calls for a reorientation in scholarly approaches to civic engagement fromasking questions of what to asking questions of how. I advance a discourse theory ofcitizenship as a mode of public engagement. Attending to modalities of citizenshiprecognizes its fluid and quotidian enactment and considers action that is purposeful,potentially uncontrollable and unruly, multiple, and supportive of radical but achievabledemocratic practices. Citizenship engagement may be approached through potential fociof generativity, risk, commitment, creativity, and sociability. A discourse theory reformu-lates the relationship between citizenship and citizen, reveals differences in enactmentsof citizenship, and calls attention to hybrid cases of citizenship.

Keywords: Citizenship; Discourse; Civic Engagement; Democracy; Subjectivity

In recent years, citizenship has been subjected to increased scrutiny. Commentatorshave devoted considerable energy to assessing the status of citizenship in contempor-ary U.S. society. Some see citizenship as on the wane. In an especially influentialaccount, Robert Putnam asserts that “Americans have been dropping out in droves”from political and associational life.1 Citing declines in voting, campaign volunteer-ing, letter writing, attendance at public meetings and rallies, club membership, andorganizational office-holding, among other activities, Putnam warns of the poten-tially destructive consequences of declines in civic engagement for democraticpolitics. He identifies television as a prime culprit, which is especially baneful in hisview because “citizenship is not a spectator sport.”2 Echoing this language, theNational Commission on Civic Renewal worries that “we are in danger of becominga nation of spectators. … Too many of us,” the Commission bemoans, “lackconfidence in our capacity to make basic moral and civic judgments, to join with ourneighbors to do the work of community, to make a difference.”3 For MatthewCrenson and Benjamin Ginsberg, contemporary trends indicate that the modern era

Robert Asen is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Correspondenceto: 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 thisarticle. A portion of this article was presented at the 2003 Alta Conference on Argumentation.

ISSN 0033–5630 (print)/ISSN 1479-5779 (online) ! 2004 National Communication AssociationDOI: 10.1080/0033563042000227436

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of the citizen is “quietly slipping away.”4 No longer dependent on citizens’ voluntarycompliance to administer policies, finance operations, or field armies, elites havereduced their role in governance.

Others regard these assessments as too pessimistic. Everett Ladd, for example,interprets declining nationwide memberships in voluntary associations as indicativeof a different phenomenon. Where Putnam sees decline, Ladd sees a turn away fromcentralized, national organizations to decentralized, local groups.5 Membership oforganizations like the PTA has declined because parents have substituted othergroup affiliations to accomplish the same goals. Ladd celebrates vibrant civic life inthe vast proliferation of small groups that constitute contemporary civic engage-ment. Carmen Sirianni and Lewis Friedland caution against placing too muchemphasis on aggregate levels of involvement. Instead, they call attention to civicinnovations that “can provide effective responses to the increasingly complex andobdurate problems we face and can help to form a nation of effective citizens.”6

Others suggest wariness toward overly narrow longitudinal measures. Some scholarscontend that such measures ignore changes in forms of participation over time.According to Robert Wuthnow, the organization man and clubwoman of the 1950sepitomized civic involvement. These figures affirmed an implicit link between serviceand belonging; their memberships highlighted the value of loyalty. Wuthnowcontends that we live more loosely connected lives today, and we have adapted ourforms of civic participation to these conditions.7 Non-profit professionals, volun-teers, and soulmates have replaced organization men and clubwomen.

Whether pessimistic or optimistic about the health of civic life, whether interestedin traditional or new types of civic involvement, whether focused on participation inindividual or group settings, discussions of civic engagement exhibit a particularinvestigative tendency. Commentators tend to regard citizenship as constituted inspecific acts.8 This tendency may be most evident in the research of those who seecitizenship on the decline. Turning to trends in activities like voting, jury duty, andcampaign volunteering, proponents of this view argue that Americans are lesscivic-minded than in decades past. Those who uphold the continued vibrancy ofcitizenship also look to specific acts. Membership in self-help groups like AlcoholicsAnonymous may have replaced membership in the Rotary Club, and episodicvolunteer work may have replaced sustained participation in benevolent societies,but the former still stand as constitutive acts of citizenship. Contemporary assess-ments of citizenship, then, differ in examining the types of activities that peopleengage in and the frequency with which people engage in these activities, but theseassessments tend to converge in seeking answers to the question of what counts ascitizenship.

There are problems with counting citizenship, however.9 The first problemappears in the caution against employing overly narrow longitudinal measures.These measures may ignore changes in forms of participation over time. Trackingmembership in the Order of Elks over 50 years, for example, may not reveal the waysin which declining membership in fraternal organizations has been supplemented byincreased participation in other ways. Second, focusing on what counts as citizenship

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deflects attention from the evaluative criteria employed by scholars assessing prac-tices of citizenship. On what grounds should scholars judge citizenship as practicedthrough particular kinds of memberships? Are expressly policy-oriented groupsmore or less civic-minded than benevolent societies? These questions intimate athird problem with counting citizenship: doing so may circumscribe agency bypresenting a set of activities for people to adopt. Counting may encourage aconceptual apriorism that creates a one-way information flow from evaluativecriteria to existing practices. In this case, opportunities for existing practices toinform evaluative criteria would be lost. Fourth, counting characterizes citizenship asa zero-sum game. Certain activities are either undertaken or not, whether onefocuses on voting, serving on juries, volunteering for Habitat for Humanity, orattending a support group. Asking the question of what counts as citizenship doesnot admit degrees of difference, yet the same activity may express a differentmeaning and significance in various contexts.

Rather than asking what counts as citizenship, we should ask: how do people enactcitizenship? Reorienting our framework from a question of what to a question ofhow usefully redirects our attention from acts to action. Inquiring into the how ofcitizenship recognizes citizenship as a process. From this perspective, citizenshipdoes not appear in specific acts per se, but signals a process that may encompass anumber of different activities. Of course, specific acts and the trends they exhibitdeserve scholarly attention. Theda Skocpol argues persuasively that the declininginfluence of membership federations in U.S. civic life has produced decidedly lessegalitarian democratic practices. Organizations like the American Legion and theGeneral Federation of Women’s Clubs created opportunities for cross-class fellow-ship that otherwise would have been unavailable to members. In contrast, today’sadvocacy groups frequently focus on the interests of upper-middle-class constituen-cies. Skocpol concludes that “the wealthiest and best educated people are moreprivileged in America’s reconfigured civic world than their (less numerous) counter-parts were in the pre-1960s civic world.”10 So acts matter. Yet we also need toexamine—and perhaps this ought to be highlighted from a communication perspec-tive—how people engage others. Membership in the American Legion was notuniversally available, and legionnaires construed their membership duties differently.Conceiving of citizenship as a process enables examination of such differences. Interms of our assessments, whether we adopt pessimistic or optimistic outlooks,reigning conceptions of citizenship may be unduly limiting our search for evidenceof civic engagement, both in terms of the places we look and the things we look for.

In this essay, I advance a discourse theory of citizenship.11 A discourse theoryconceives of citizenship as a mode of public engagement. In drawing attention tocitizenship as a process, a discourse theory recognizes the fluid, multimodal, andquotidian enactments of citizenship in a multiple public sphere. I develop thisconception over the four main sections of my essay. In the first section, I set thestage for my explication of citizenship as a mode by connecting inquiries intocitizenship to larger questions of public subjectivity. In this light, theories ofcitizenship may offer affirmative articulations of public subjectivity. In the second

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section, I explicate a critical perspective enabled by theorizing citizenship as a modeof public engagement. Doing so draws attention to action that is purposeful,potentially uncontrollable and unruly, multiple, and supportive of radical butachievable democratic practices. I discuss how scholars may approach modalities ofcitizenship in the third section of this essay. I suggest generativity, risk, commitment,creativity, and sociability as potential foci. In the fourth section of this essay, Iilluminate the ways that a discourse theory extends our understanding of citizenship.A discourse theory reformulates the relationship between citizenship and citizen,reveals differences in enactments of citizenship, and calls attention to hybrid cases ofcitizenship.

Subjectivity and Publicity

Questions of citizenship raise questions of public subjectivity. My purpose in thissection is to ask rather than answer some of these questions. This is because thesequestions should not be answered independently of explications of particularmodalities; general answers to questions of public subjectivity would impose a falsesingularity on issues that may be explored usefully from multiple perspectives.Asking questions of public subjectivity presents the larger conceptual landscape ofwhich a discourse theory of citizenship is only one part. This landscape includesissues of diversity, representation, and identity.

The need for a discourse theory of citizenship arises in part from the achievementsof public sphere scholarship. A discursive conception of citizenship may offer onecase, but not the only case, of an affirmative articulation of public subjectivity. Sofar, important work in public sphere scholarship has proceeded negatively todescribe who subjects are not, namely, not the people presumed in the ideologicalrendering of subjectivity in the bourgeois public sphere. Research on this topic hasexplicated the ways that particular discursive forums may invite, perhaps compel,particular forms of participation. Daniel Brouwer, for example, considers thestruggles faced by members of the AIDS activist group ACT UP after being invitedto testify before various congressional committees.12 ACT UP had built its reputationthrough a principled refusal to accept as settled standard ways of debating publichealth issues. ACT UP successfully pressed for reforms of public health proceduresthat might not have happened had the group sought redress through standardchannels. Congressional testimony, which members of the group eventually decidedto pursue, raised the threat of cooptation, because testifying meant abiding by thediscursive norms of the hearing room. From a historical perspective, Susan Zaeskeexamines the petitioning of women abolitionists.13 By signing anti-slavery petitions,these women enacted public subjectivities of citizenship denied to them in thelegitimating discourses of the nineteenth-century U.S. Efforts by members of Con-gress to table women’s petitions produced exactly the opposite effect: this responserecognized women’s political subjectivity by treating it as something that had to beset aside.

In prescribing particular forms of participation, public fora deny particular


subjectivities to people whose identities lie outside “universal” bourgeois norms.Michael Warner has referred to this denial as the “minoritizing logic of domination”:to call attention to one’s own particularity is to be less than a (universal) subject.14

The ability to abstract oneself from one’s body is not equally available to all. Instead,a view of the subject as disembodied reflects specific cultural practices. Seeking tomake explicit and overcome these elisions, Ronald Greene calls on communicationscholars to attend to the cultural dimensions of citizenship.15 He encourages scholarsto consider the processes by which particular subjects are marked as “different” anddenied access to civic venues.

A lesson learned from existing scholarship is that we need to recognize, appreciate,facilitate, and draw upon multiple subjectivities. This holds both for when scholarsconsider the multitude of participants in public fora as well as when we considerindividual participants themselves.16 In terms of multitudes, any attempt to install asingular notion of subjectivity as exemplary would entail an unavoidable privilegingof the socio-cultural backgrounds of some participants over others. Even fora thatarticulate explicit commitments to principles of neutrality (such as law courts) donot proceed in a context-free manner. Specific contexts invoke regulatory norms andpractices that intimate particular participatory histories. In terms of individuals, asingular notion of public subjectivity denies the complexity that characterizes ourdaily lives. People act in public often, but they do so in various situations withdifferent motivations (as, for example, caring neighbors or media personalities). Asingular notion of public subjectivity would artificially limit the ways that individualsmay act in public. Valuing multiplicity, however, leaves open the question ofconceptual reconstruction. The question remains whether we can theorize subjec-tivity affirmatively without essentializing and reifying the subject and reproducingthe historical and conceptual exclusions of bourgeois subjectivity.

Theorizing subjectivity directs scholars toward issues involved in exploring andpracticing the politics of representation.17 Insofar as scholars investigate the ways inwhich discourse constructs aspects of our shared social world, communicationscholarship importantly addresses the politics of representation. Addressing thispolitics means examining the ways that representational processes implicate partici-pants in often implicit choices about how one should present oneself and others.Representing does not proceed in a value-neutral and transparent manner, butinvokes the social values, beliefs, and interests of participants in public discourse.Representations work with the symbolic materials of specific cultures. In thiscontext, notions of subjectivity compose a scaffolding for specific representations;subjectivities may be enabling conditions for representational processes. Studying theinvention, circulation, and interpretation of representations may reveal the implica-tions of the latter in notions of subjectivity. This relationship is important becausecertain subjectivities may invite certain modes of encountering and interacting withothers. One might ask whether the liberal subject (the autonomous individualendowed with rights) may be read equally as a citizen and consumer, as thecontemporary linkage of neoliberalism and globalization seems to suggest. Onemight inquire, too, about representations enabled by the “postmodern” subject.

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A discursive conception of citizenship may also offer some insights into resolvingpotentially troubling issues of identity. To a significant degree, scholarship that seeksto recover voices excluded from “canonical” surveys of public discourse, includingscholarship in feminist, social movement and vernacular discourse, broaches issuesof identity.18 As a theory and praxis, identity (politics) has increasingly been calledinto question.19 Iris Young holds that group identity is undermined by dilemmas ofdifference. To the extent to which they establish inside-outside distinctions amonggroups, group identities fix fluid social relations and deny differentiation within andacross groups. Moreover, group identities may suggest that all members share a setof common interests and agree on the strategies for pursuing these interests. Youngdoes not dismiss the impact that social groupings have on people’s everyday lives,but she proposes that groups be understood “in relational terms rather than asself-identical substantial entities with essential attributes.”20 For Rita Felski, differ-ence has become doxa in contemporary feminist scholarship; however, one cannotand should not hope to return to a unifying notion of identity. She urges instead thatsubjectivity be viewed through metaphors of hybridity that “not only recognizedifferences within the individual subject, fracturing and complicating holistic notionsof identity, but also look at connections between subjects by recognizing affiliationsand repetitions.”21

The challenge for theorists of group identity is to articulate conceptions thatsuccessfully negotiate dilemmas of difference. Subjectivity need not equal identity.Theorizing subjectivity through citizenship and other modes may illuminate inevi-table tensions entailed in conceptualizing identity. As Young and Felski suggest,conceptualizing identity raises the danger of reductionism, which poses questionsabout whether identities are necessarily reductive, strategically reductive, or neither.In any case, theorists of group identity need to consider what similarities anddifferences ought to be accounted for when conceptualizing identity. These questionsmay prompt further reflection on the ways in which social actors negotiate a senseof self that intersects with multiple group affiliations and the ways social actorsimagine others. Theorizing subjectivity as a process rather than a set of ascriptivecharacteristics, status attributes, or membership standing may illuminate tensionsentailed in conceptualizing identity and enable articulations of subjectivity as fluidand dynamic.

Citizenship as a Mode of Public Engagement

Theorizing citizenship as a mode of public engagement draws attention, first andforemost, to citizenship as a mode. As noted above, this perspective shifts our focusfrom what constitutes citizenship to how citizenship proceeds. Mode denotes amanner of doing something, a method of proceeding in any activity. Mode distin-guishes the manner by which something is done from what is done. Mode highlightsagency: someone is doing a deed. Drawing this distinction conceptually suggests thata theory of citizenship ought to take into account dispositional factors by placing“manner” and “deed” in relation to each other. Although not determinative,


intention enters into the field of action. To be sure, scholars cannot simply acceptthe stated intention of agents in studying human interactions, but neither can theseintentions be dismissed. The same activity can take on different meanings whenundertaken from different perspectives and located in different interpretive contexts.Interpretive contexts emerge in the perceptions of agents and audiences alike. Forinstance, the act of voting exhibits a uniformity that is independent of the attitudeof the individual voter. Yet it matters greatly in understanding the social significanceof voting, whether voters regard their actions and the actions of others as a sham,a duty, or an expression of the voice of the people. Disposition and interpretationplay important roles in the construction of social meanings. If we are to understandcitizenship as a social endeavor, we ought to introduce these qualities into ourconception.

A mode cannot be contained easily. As a mode, citizenship cannot be restricted tocertain people, places, or topics. Of course, historical practices of citizenship alwayshave been restricted along these lines, and no theory can proscribe actual exclusions.Theorizing citizenship as a mode loosens conceptual restrictions, which, in turn, maybroaden our view and deepen our understanding of existing practices. Mode doesnot introduce a priori conceptual restrictions on citizenship that delimit its enact-ment. Most notably, citizenship as a mode of public engagement does not restrict itspractice to civil society or institutional politics. Modality signals a wider field ofapplication than the phrase “civic engagement,” for example, which frequently refersto electoral politics and voluntary associations. By contrast, citizenship engagementcannot be kept in place. Modes of engagement are not manifest only at certainprescribed times; modes do not arise at regular intervals.

Citizenship engagement is potentially unruly. Actions that begin on a small scalemay spread across social, cultural, and political sites. Issues that appear initially asunimportant may increase in magnitude. Citizenship as a mode is also potentiallyunruly because it exceeds the control of authorities, institutions, or influentialgroups. Modes of citizenship need not be sanctioned by ruling authorities, and theyresist management and direction by those in power. Because of their fluidity, modesof engagement stand in tension with established authorities and institutions. Modesmay unsettle as they proceed, potentially calling into question the taken-for-grantedand discounting notions of propriety. Modes of engagement may reveal the partialityof perspective obfuscated in the “common” of common sense. Moreover, if modesresist outside attempts at shaping or guiding, then the outcomes of specific instancesof citizenship engagement cannot always be known in advance. Engagement thatbegins with one issue may shift course and take up other issues as it proceeds.Citizenship engagement may open up unforeseen possibilities. The unruliness ofengagement arises in part from the historical contingency of restrictions on citizen-ship.

Modes are multiple. To acknowledge this point is to recognize that citizenship isonly one of many modes of public subjectivity. People may become public subjectsthrough their work habits, consumption patterns, and familial interactions. Insofaras subjectivity emerges through our interactions with others, and insofar as our

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interactions with others are varied, and insofar as we behave differently in thesedifferent interactions, we create different public selves. Multiplicity makes citizenshippossible by situating it as something one can take up, rather than as a condition thatis always or never present. People do not—and should not—enact citizenship all thetime. Full-time citizenship imposes a false simplicity on people’s complicated livesand frames citizenship as a burden rather than a process of active, willful uptake. Inthe present climate, too, full-time citizenship resonates dangerously with an in-satiable nationalism. Instead, we ought to encourage various modes of publicinteraction.

Citizenship as a mode of public engagement stands in contrast to denunciationsof citizenship that judge its practices against an impossible ideal. Walter Lippmann,for example, decried democracy as a false hope because democrats presumedwrongly that “the people, all of them, are competent.”22 Champions of democracyexpected too much from citizens. Lippmann complained that “the citizen, thesovereign, is apparently expected to yield an unlimited quality of public spirit,interest, curiosity and effort.”23 People could not know about everything all the time,and to concentrate one’s efforts on one thing at one time meant that countless otherthings went unattended. Education was bound to disappoint because the worldchanged too fast. Neither could one’s conscience be a guide because there were toomany moral codes. Moreover, Lippmann believed, moral codes themselves dependedon substantive knowledge of issues and events. Practicing democracy also failed tocreate better citizens because practice entailed only a repetition of present patholo-gies. Lippmann concluded that “the ideal of the omnicompetent, sovereign citizenis … a false ideal. It is unattainable. The pursuit of it is misleading. The failure toachieve it has produced the current disenchantment.”24 Lippmann stressed that hiscomplaint concerned the attainment, not the desirability, of the ideal, yet we shouldreject his ideal on both counts. Citizenship need not be a full-time job. Peopleshould not feel guilty when indulging in non-citizenship activities. People need notdevote endless time and energy to fulfilling their citizenship obligations. Practicingcitizenship does not require perfect knowledge.

Theorizing citizenship as a mode draws on a radical, not an unattainable, view ofdemocracy. This view gathers inspiration from such figures as John Dewey, whoregarded democracy as a way of life.25 In a 1939 essay titled “Creative Democracy—the Task Before Us,” Dewey held that “democracy is a personal way of individuallife … it signifies the possession and continual use of certain attitudes, formingpersonal character and determining desire and purpose in all the relations of life.”26

The radical quality of this perspective on democracy appears in its non-institutional,anti-essential orientation: Democracy is not confined to a set of institutions orspecific acts, but appears as a guiding spirit that informs human interaction.Democracy asks not for people’s unlimited energy and knowledge, but for theircreative participation. Moreover, the spirit of democracy manifests itself in its mostquotidian enactments.

Dewey’s conception has several qualities that intimate advantages to regardingsubjectivity and citizenship, especially in the context of democratic polities, as


processes. Democracy appears as an active achievement rather than a passive steadystate. The renewal of democracy, Dewey insisted, requires “inventive effort andcreative activity.” People need to break “the habit of thinking of democracy as a kindof political mechanism that will work as long as citizens were [sic] reasonably faithfulin performing political duties.”27 As an achievement, democracy signifies somethingboth enacted by individuals and yet realized as the creation of everyone. Dewey’sreference to personal attitudes did not signal advocacy of an individualist vision ofdemocracy. In The Public and Its Problems, Dewey held that democracy “is the ideaof community life itself.”28 His embrace of personal attitudes and communitysuggested that democracy should be articulated from the perspective of bothindividuals and groups. From the perspective of the individual, democracy meansparticipation in and direction of the activities of the groups with which one affiliates.From the perspective of the group, democracy means the liberation of individualpotentiality. Flexible interaction and a free give-and-take among groups enablepersonal development. Human interaction, too, secures democracy. Dewey ex-plained that “the heart and final guarantee of democracy is in free gatherings ofneighbors on the street corner to discuss back and forth what is read in theuncensored news of the day, and in gatherings of friends in the living rooms ofhouses and apartments to converse freely with one another.”29 Democracy’s heartdoes not beat in the halls of Congress or in the voting booth, but in everydayenactments of citizenship. To situate democracy in this way invests democracydramatically in ordinary folk, not leaders or elected or appointed officials. Thismakes democracy realizable as something other than a grandiose dream of suddenrevolutionary social change or a waiting until one’s allies are “in power” to enactdemocracy.

Realization of democracy through human interaction highlights the role ofcommunication in this process. Through communication, democracy appears as theinstantiation of community. Dewey observed that living among others is a conditionof human existence. Only communication can turn this bare fact of existence intoa social order. He explained that “human associations … develop into societies in ahuman sense only as their consequences, being known, are esteemed and soughtfor.”30 Thus, communication constitutes the “primary loyalty” of democracy.31 To beeffective, communication must be creatively and aesthetically engaged. Dewey heldthat solutions to contemporary social problems require reformers to considerexplicitly issues of dissemination. Consideration of these issues leads one to thequestion of art, and Dewey answered this question emphatically: “The freeing of theartist in literary presentation, in other words, is as much a precondition of thedesirable creation of adequate opinion on public matters as is the freeing of socialinquiry.”32 Creative, aesthetic uses of communication promise to reconnect people topublic affairs and to each other. Unlike Lippmann, Dewey did not fault publics forexhibiting a lack of interest in democratic practices. Instead, he placed the burdenon advocates to engage others through innovative communicative practices. Suchpractices also carry the potential for powerful social critique. Dewey maintained that“the function of art has always been to break through the crust of conventionalized

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and routine consciousness.”33 New perceptions require new communicative prac-tices. The realization of democracy invites an explosion of existing forms ofcommunication.

As a contingent human creation carried out through communication, democracyrests, in the last instance, on faith. Dewey acknowledged this democratic faithexplicitly. He believed that democracy rests on faith in human potentiality, humanjudgment, and the capacity of people to work together, which cannot be limited byrace, sex, class, or cultural background. To renounce this faith is to renounce faithin the possibility of democracy. Yet Dewey was not naıve. He admitted that materialconditions have to be improved so that people may realize potentialities, exercisejudgment, and conduct social cooperation. Obtaining the conditions for thefulfillment of democratic practices demands social action. Dewey rejected reificationsentailed in abstract commitments to concepts that ignored or discounted historicalcircumstances.34

Although democracy must be historically grounded, it cannot be empiricallyverified. Human potentiality, intelligence, and collegiality cannot be verified aselements of our physical world. Democracy requires a leap of faith. Belief indemocracy is like belief in God; either one has faith or one does not. Radicalskepticism cannot be met with irrefutable, empirical proof. Democracy thus consti-tutes a moral project. Dewey explained that “treating [democracy] as a way ofpersonal life is to realize that democracy is a moral ideal and so far as it becomes afact is a moral fact.”35 As a creation of human interaction, however, democracy cannever become a fact, as Dewey acknowledged in The Public and Its Problems.36 As amoral project, democracy calls for sustained engagement and amelioration. Democ-racy does not appear in a set of problems that can be solved conclusively. Strivingfor democracy constitutes a continuous process. Democracy signals an orientationtoward action in various domains of human activity rather than a singularlydelineated end.

Engaging Citizenship Engagement

How, then, may scholars interested in issues of public subjectivity approach citizen-ship as a mode of public engagement? How can we engage citizenship? I attempt toanswer these questions in this section by explicating qualities that may usefully behighlighted in analyses of citizenship practices. Specifically, we may wish to considerhow citizenship engagement proceeds generatively, exhibits risk, affirms commit-ment, expresses creativity, and fosters sociability. I present these qualities as potentialfoci for a critical orientation, as avenues for approaching citizenship engagement. Ido not wish to uphold these qualities as constitutive characteristics of citizenship; todo so would inevitably raise questions of what counts as citizenship. Taken asconstitutive, these qualities would appear as a checklist for identifying and effectivelyhypostatizing citizenship. To avoid this fate, we may wish to defer indefinitely thequestion of constitution.37 This also means that these qualities need not be taken asan inseparable set. Adopting any one of these foci may lead investigations of


citizenship engagement in various directions. This also suggests that specific answersto questions about the how of citizenship engagement cannot be provided throughtheorizing. To discern how citizenship is engaged, we must turn to practice.

One useful turn considers how citizenship engagement proceeds generatively,exploring, for example, the ways that citizenship engagement expands discursivespace by widening public agendas and inviting greater participation.38 If we concep-tualize a multiple public sphere through metaphors of constellations or networks,then we can examine the ways in which citizenship engagement increases the nodalpoints in these configurations. Engagement facilitates rather than constrains others’ability to participate. Linda Alcoff and Laura Gray, for example, explore ways thatsurvivors of rape, incest, and sexual assault have engaged in alternative speakingsituations to de-legitimize the expert who is often privileged to “make sense” of asurvivor’s experiences in mass-mediated fora.39 In these situations and others,engagement may prompt advocates and audiences alike to consider new issues andsee existing issues in new ways. The value of greater participation lies not in itsquantitative but its qualitative contributions. More voices bolster public agendasbecause they raise distinct perspectives and encourage different ways of participating.New nodes link up with existing nodes to create new pathways in the networks ofthe public sphere. Engagement occurs amid points in existing networks, whichthemselves are always incomplete.

Generative functions may be illuminated by examining how engagement treatslines of public and private as discursive constructions. If there is no singular publicthat stands out against a private domain, then understandings of public and privatedepend on where in a network one considers these issues. Prevailing understandingsof public and private signal neither necessary nor fixed demarcations but thecreations of past participants in public spheres. This contingent quality means thatlines can be redrawn. Indeed, debates and controversies often highlight line drawingas a key point of contention. In a study of the discourse of the fur controversy, forinstance, Kathryn Olson and G. Thomas Goodnight explain that anti-fur activistssought to reconfigure purchasing decisions as public acts with consequences extend-ing beyond the wearer of the garment.40 For their part, industry spokespeopleinsisted that fashion choices were private decisions that rested solely with theindividual consumer. As this example suggests, line drawing entails a politics. Thisis because drawing particular lines will be regarded differently by different partici-pants and because line drawing partially reflects social hierarchies and inequalities.Some participants will be better positioned to draw lines that better represent theirinterests. Examining processes of citizenship may enable understanding of themanner and significance of lines drawn in discursive engagements.

Citizenship engagement exhibits risk. Engaging others is risky because it encour-ages us to put our beliefs into play. We risk thinking differently, coming to seeourselves as wrong. Risk may be especially disconcerting when it implicates beliefsaround which we have organized our lives. An example of this risk can be found, inof all places, on the floor of the U.S. Senate. In 1993, senators debated renewing thepatent on the emblem for the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Having already

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objected to the patent extension earlier in the day during Judiciary Committeehearings, Carol Moseley-Braun, an African American senator from Illinois, rose toput forward a motion to table the extension on procedural grounds. Her motion wasdefeated in a close vote. Stunned but not deterred, Moseley-Braun spoke again—thistime explicitly noting the racist symbolism of the emblem. What followed, notesJohn Butler, was remarkable. Senators who voted against Moseley-Braun the firsttime rose to support her. Butler observes that the speech of Senator Howell Heflinof Alabama was particularly moving. Heflin asserted that he revered his family, “andI respect those who thought whatever they were doing was right at that particulartime in our Nation’s history. But we live today in a different world. We live in aNation that every day is trying to heal the scars of racism that have occurred in thepast.”41 As Heflin’s concession suggests, the risk of engagement entails a respect forothers. To engage others is to grant implicitly a threshold of respect sufficient toenter into processes of reason-giving and perspective-taking. Both signal a reciprocalsocial trust insofar as risk makes one vulnerable to another.42 Respect for others isa check—albeit not foolproof—against violence and coercion.

Opening oneself up to risk intimates a willingness to change one’s mind. This doesnot refer to the anticipation of and assent to specific positions prior to engagingothers. A senator need not have said—nor should have said—“I see that the renewalof the emblem for the United Daughters of the Confederacy is on the agenda today.I shall consider possible objections.” Moseley-Braun’s specific interventionprompted a rethinking on the part of some of her colleagues. The possible con-cession intimated in risk consists of a more general willingness to engage alternativeperspectives. Risk entails genuinely engaging difference. Engagement refers neither todismissing alternative values and ideas nor to accepting them unchallenged.43

Engagement enables encounters. We may engage other perspectives to discern theirpotential persuasive power for us as well as the ways these perspectives invite theassent of others. Engagement fosters appreciation that the social legitimacy of ourown worldviews is dependent, in turn, on the very recognition that others seek fromus. We can imagine that others will formulate judgments as well, behaving like us,either perfunctorily or conscientiously in reaching these judgments.

Risk does not reduce commitment, which may be pursued as a path towardcitizenship engagement. Risk arises from the contingency that attends citizenshipengagement. Engaging others encourages people to step out from familiar andcomfortable situations to encounters in which our beliefs and values will be tested.Risk does not suggest an uncertain, unfinished, or erratic quality to belief thatinduces withdrawal. As far as one knows, one stands for what is right. We makedecisions on the basis of material available to us. Absent cases of personal ambiv-alence and perceived internal contradiction, which certainly inform our actions attimes, we feel justified in holding the positions we hold. We do not live our lives asindividuals awaiting perfect knowledge in order to reach decisions. The rhetoricaltradition demonstrates clearly that advocacy—often tireless, passionate advocacy—proceeds under conditions of imperfect knowledge. One cannot know for certainwhether war is just or not, but this lack of certainty has not prevented appeals for


and against war. Engagement positions people as rhetorical agents hoping topersuade and/or seek recognition from others of their views, even as it recognizesthat others hope to do the same. Commitment thus extends to a commitment tointeraction itself. This extended commitment, in turn, suggests an ethic of interac-tion. A commitment to engaging others privileges norms of inclusion and fairness.44

Yet these norms do not carry an a priori directive for people to follow; participantsarticulate context-specific understandings of how to include various perspectives andhow to treat perspectives fairly in specific moments of engagement.

Risk and commitment may be best treated as a pair that must persist in anirresolvable critical tension.45 To resolve this tension exclusively in the direction ofrisk or commitment would be to succumb to debilitating cynicism or dangeroushubris. Both cynicism and hubris improperly fix fluid situations and obstructprocesses of citizenship. Cynicism fixes by rendering one immobile. Unchecked riskleading to cynicism implies that there is no ground for alternative viewpointsbecause all grounds are suspect. Hubris fixes by rendering one’s position inflexible.Unchecked commitment leading to hubris implies that there is no ground foralternative viewpoints because grounds cannot be shared across positions, and onealready occupies the secure ground. Neither unchecked risk nor unchecked commit-ment offer reasons to attend to the perspectives of others. Keeping risk andcommitment in tension sustains the movement implicit in regarding citizenship asaction.

Citizenship engagement need not be regarded as somber and solemn action.Scholars can investigate the ways in which engagement expresses creativity throughits playful qualities.46 In doing so, we may explore the ways that people challengerules of decorum in clever and silly ways. Indeed, this sort of playfulness may becrucial to sustaining advocates’ energy and drive. Engaging in ameliorative actioncan be hard and downright depressing. Moved by a sense of social injustice, forexample, advocates sometimes perceive that they confront long odds in achievingtheir goals. Playfulness may be crucial for sustaining participants’ hopefulness insituations in which they face entrenched and powerful resistance.47 Expressing one’sviewpoint creatively may recast difficult work as fun and thereby renew one’sstrength.

An illuminating instance of creative engagement appears in the actions of JohnAndrew from Northfield, Minnesota, who, in the summer of 2003, lost his job afterthe software company that employed him downsized its workforce. On the same daythat he was laid off, Andrew learned that the Bush administration planned toconduct a bus tour through Minnesota and Wisconsin featuring the secretaries ofcommerce, labor, and treasury. Seeking to promote its economic and tax policies, theadministration named the tour the “Jobs and Growth Tour.” Andrew decided tolaunch his own tour, “The Economic Reality Tour,” which consisted of Andrewfollowing the Bush team in his family’s minivan. He pasted the minivan with signsand constructed a Web site to detail his progress. On the site Andrew postedhighlights of his travels, such as an exchange with Treasury Secretary John Snow overthe elimination of his job. Snow told Andrew that the administration’s first round

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of tax cuts had not yet taken effect and a second round of cuts were several monthsaway, but Snow expressed confidence that Andrew would find a job. Andrewprotested: “But, but … we’ve already lost over 900,000 jobs just since Marchfirst … a job at Wal-Mart just won’t support my family.” Ignoring Andrew’s largerpoint, Snow reiterated his confidence in Andrew’s job prospects. In addition tohighlights from his tour, Andrew’s Web site contained a map of the tour route, aWeb log, photos of his family and minivan, photos from tour stops (including aphoto of the headquarters of the Best Buy Corporation, where the secretaries helda “town hall” meeting), links to related sites, his email address, and emails frompeople supporting and opposing his position.48

This example illustrates creativity expressed by utilizing multiple modes of com-munication. Andrew used verbal and visual modes to call attention to his circum-stances as well as the condition of the economy. In doing so, he critiqued what heregarded as the inaccuracies of the “Jobs and Growth Tour.” This example suggests,too, that creative citizenship engagement may advance critiques of existing forms ofexpression and existing standards for assessing communicative competence. Currentpractices and standards reflect the experiences and values of particular individualsand groups. Citizenship engagement may call attention to the particularity of thesepractices and the social hierarchies implicit in evaluative standards. In confrontingSecretary Snow about job losses, Andrew violated rules of propriety by turning astaged (publicity) event into an opportunity for critique. His actions demonstratedthat such rules can restrict deliberation. Moreover, in critiquing existing practicesand standards, citizenship engagement may reveal their inadequacies and engendernew communicative practices and standards. The Web log, which appeared onAndrew’s site and has appeared on thousands of other Web sites over the past fewyears, is one such example.

Citizenship engagement fosters sociability. Sociability may be discerned in thecollective character of ostensibly individual activities and the perspective-takingentailed in critical judgment. Scholars such as Benedict Anderson, Jurgen Habermas,and Michael Warner have noted that new literary and cultural forms and practiceshave aided emerging publics and political institutions.49 All three authors haveconsidered how, at different historical moments, the development of the novelattached a social significance to individual reading practices. Readers of novels couldimagine themselves as belonging to a larger reading public that had social standingand, ultimately, could make claims on political institutions, including reshapingthese institutions. The novel represented a different cultural artifact than thepersonal letter. The personal letter enabled an exchange between two individuals,and this exchange could remain private if the individuals preferred. A novelrepresented an exchange among many people. Novels were written not for individ-uals as individuals, but for individuals as members of publics.

The perspective-taking entailed in critical judgment has been explicated bytheorists such as Hannah Arendt and Ronald Beiner. Arendt maintains that judg-ment entails the adoption of Kant’s notion of an “enlarged mentality.” From thisperspective, judgment requires the actual or imagined presence of others “‘in whose


place’ it must think, whose perspectives it must take into consideration, and withoutwhom it never has the opportunity to operate at all.” This social dimension iscontext-specific. The reach of a particular judgment “can never extend further thanthe others in whose place the judging person has put [him/herself].”50 Similarly,Ronald Beiner holds that reflective judgment deals with the qualities of specificsituations. It requires, too, the use of our imagination. To judge, “I must projectmyself, imaginatively, into a position I do not actually occupy, in order to enlargemy perspective and thereby open up an awareness of new possibilities, to broadenthe range of alternatives from which my judgment then makes its selection.”51

There is a sense in which these specific judgments strive toward a universal, auniversal about which contemporary value pluralism suggests some caution. Theuniversal appears in the intimation that diverse perspectives can be uniformlyadopted. Arendt explains that the political character of judgment arises from an“ability to see things not only from one’s point of view but in the perspective of allthose who happen to be present.”52 Our caution may dissuade us from presumingthat presence is a sufficient condition for perspective-taking. Perspectives draw onexperiences that are not fully accessible to others.53 A contemporary amendment tothese descriptions of judgment may be to recognize our situation among others,which entails recognition of how we can and cannot adopt the perspectives of peopledifferently situated from us. Still, recognizing the limits of perspective-taking is itselfan engagement with others and, as such, a social process.

Extending Citizenship

I have argued that counting citizenship by assessing its practice through constitutiveacts may limit our approach in terms of the places we look and the things we lookfor. One way, then, to determine the value of conceptualizing citizenship as a modeof public engagement is to consider how this conception extends our understandingof citizenship. That is, we ought to consider how a discourse theory enables us torecognize citizenship as a fluid, multimodal, and quotidian process. In this section,I address three ways that a discourse theory extends our understanding of citizen-ship: by reformulating our understanding of the relationship between citizenship andcitizen; by revealing how enactments of citizenship are differently available to peoplesituated by social hierarchies and political and economic inequalities; and by callingour attention to hybrid cases of citizenship engagement.

Theorizing citizenship as a mode of public engagement encourages us to reformu-late our understanding of the relationship between citizenship and citizen. Of mostimportance, this means not regarding citizenship as the possession of citizens. To besure, this is the prevailing view. Indeed, it is the only definition of citizenship offeredby the Oxford English Dictionary, which defines citizenship as “the position or statusof being a citizen, with its rights and privileges.”54 By contrast, when viewed as amode of public engagement, citizenship appears as a performance, not a possession.Citizenship engagement cannot be distilled to a set of rights, condition of member-ship, or allegiance to a cultural tradition.55 A discourse theory shifts our understand-

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ing of citizenship from a status attribute to a way of acting. Seen not as the exclusivepossession of citizens, citizenship may not be granted. Instead, people enact citizen-ship through their own agency. This means, too, that citizenship may be enacted bynon-citizens.

From a discourse theory perspective, the relationship between citizen and citizen-ship does not represent unidirectional movement from the former to the latter.“Citizen” functions as a category. Typically upheld as honorific, citizen accords itsmembers important legal, social, economic, and political rights and privileges. As acategory, citizen includes and excludes, and it may be invoked to silence non-citizensor to coerce citizens. To deny citizens possession of citizenship is to open up acritical space between the two that enables exploration of each from the perspectiveof the other. Considering the activities of citizens may tell us something about theenactment of citizenship, but we also may learn something about the category ofcitizen by considering processes of citizenship. The relationship between citizen andcitizenship may be viewed productively as bidirectional. At both a theoretical and apractical level, category and process may illuminate each other.

Enactments of citizenship may reformulate collectively held understandings ofwho may be and what it means to be a citizen. This is especially important in casesin which citizen standing may be denied or where the rights and privileges accordedto citizens may be unfairly and unevenly distributed. The U.S. civil rights movementof the 1950s and 1960s is an appropriately named example of how citizen andcitizenship are not reducible to each other, and how citizenship engagement does notnecessarily begin from settled understandings of the category of citizen. The civilrights movement was a movement. Activists’ movement, which included theirdiscursive engagement, called attention to the subject of civil rights and to the denialof these rights to some citizens and their unfair and unjust application to others.Through their enactment of citizenship, these activists engendered collectivereflection on what it meant to be a citizen and whether established understandingsof the term, which produced significant legal and social consequences, neededrevision. As this example suggests, citizenship engagement may reveal the exclusionsimplicated in particular articulations of the category of citizen.

Just as citizen standing may be denied to some and unevenly distributed to others,so, too, enactments of citizenship may be differently available to different people.Enactments of citizenship—or any other mode of subjectivity, for that matter—arealways conditioned by social status, relations of power, institutional factors, andmaterial constraints.56 In his book Wealth and Democracy, for instance, KevinPhillips offers a trenchant portrayal of the increasing income inequality in the U.S.during the past three decades. Income inequality is at its highest point since the1920s.57 Between 1977 and 1994, the lowest quintile of earners saw their after-taxincome decline by 16 percent; the second lowest experienced an eight percent declinein after-tax income; the middle quintile saw a one percent decline; the next quintileexperienced a slight gain in after-tax income of four percent. Meanwhile, earners inthe top 81 to 99 percent of income experienced a 16 percent gain in after-tax incomeand the top one percent of earners experienced an astounding 72 percent gain. In


terms of household wealth, the top one percent of U.S. households owns 40 percentof all wealth—its highest share since 1929, and up from 20.5 percent in 1979. TheU.S. now has greater economic inequality than any major Western nation. Lest wethink that the benefits of this inequality are a greater standard of living for allAmericans comparatively speaking, as economist Paul Krugman explains, when oneadjusts for the incomes of the top tiers, standards of living are roughly the same.58

These statistics raise some crucial questions, not the least of which is whether U.S.democratic practices can withstand the continuation of current trends. Is there athreshold of inequality beyond which a polity cannot facilitate democratic delibera-tive discourse? Can the gulf between the haves and the have-nots, or between thehaves and everyone else, become so wide that citizens cannot “see” each other,cannot engage in the kind of perspective-taking necessary for meaningful discourseacross differences? These statistics also raise the question of whether some basicstandard of living is necessary for meaningful participation in democratic publicdiscourse. These are questions for communication scholars, and, whatever one’sanswers, these questions may be better asked by treating citizenship as a mode ofengagement rather than a set of constitutive acts.

Whereas viewing citizenship through specific acts draws attention to their unifor-mity, theorizing citizenship as a mode of public engagement recognizes differencesin engagement. Take, for example, the quintessential act of citizenship: voting. Thepower of the vote lies in its equalizing effect. Whether one is an investment bankerwhose income has soared or whether one is an office cleaner whose income hasstagnated, each person’s vote has the same aggregative effect. Differences in incomeare erased, or at least bracketed, in the voting booth. A poor person and a richperson have the same opportunity to affect the outcome of an election; thus, theappeal of “one person, one vote.” Of course, voting rates differ among subgroups inthe population, and scholars may seek explanations for these differences, butdifferent rates do not undermine the equalizing effect or the constitutive characterof individual acts of voting. By contrast, theorizing citizenship as a mode drawsdifference into the conceptual framework by shifting our focus from act to action.If we ask questions of what, then differences take on a secondary importance so longas the what is the same for different actors. Asking questions of how entailsexamination of specific contexts of engagement. The investment banker and theoffice cleaner do not enact citizenship similarly. Opportunities for and meanings ofenactment differ. These differences are consequential both for the self-understandingof agents as well as the interpretation of their actions by others. The investmentbanker may attend a public meeting that the office cleaner cannot afford to attend.The vote of the investment banker may be more assiduously courted by politiciansand regarded by journalists as a truer indicator of public opinion, whereas thesesame groups may discourage or discount the vote of the office cleaner. Examiningmodes of engagement undoes the status bracketing sustained by viewing citizenshipthrough constitutive acts. Attention to modes of engagement makes available forscholarly examination differences that otherwise would be subordinated to theuniformity of the act qua act. This also permits scholarly investigation of the ways

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that modes of citizenship enacted under specific conditions may reconfigure theconditions of their enactment.

Attending to contexts calls our attention to hybrid cases of citizenship engage-ment. Consider the following scenario: Imagine a commuter who decides to bypassa Starbucks coffee shop on her way to work to purchase her morning beverage froma locally owned coffee shop. She makes this decision because she wishes to endorsethe business practices of the locally owned shop, which uses only suppliers who havenegotiated fair trade practices with coffee growers. These fair trade practices ensurethat the people who harvest the coffee beans are paid a living wage. If we attemptto discern the quality of this act, we may determine that it combines elements ofconsumerism and citizenship. Buying a cup of coffee is a mundane act of consump-tion. Taking a stance on a political issue—in this case, global trade—is typicallyregarded as an act of citizenship. We might attempt to resolve this ambiguity bycomparing the purchase of this cup of coffee to similar acts. We may ask how thispurchase differs from the purchase made by the person who stopped at the locallyowned shop out of convenience, or the person who stopped because the prices arelower than at Starbucks, or the person who stumbled on the locally owned shop byaccident. Each case concerns the purchase of a cup of coffee, yet each points todifferences that may lead us to judge the purchase differently.

Recognizing hybrid cases of citizenship means recognizing that acts do not possessan intrinsic quality. The act attains its meaning and significance in the way that itis enacted. The illuminating aspects of the coffee purchases do not lie in theirsimilarities but in their differences. These differences lead critical analyses andjudgments beyond the acts to their enactment. The purchases meant different thingsto the commuters. Depending on the extent of the commuters’ interactions withstore employees and other customers, the purchases may have meant different thingsto their immediate audiences as well.

Theorizing citizenship as a mode of public engagement thus allows us to recognizeits multiple manifestations. Appreciation of multiplicity enables critical examinationof practices that might otherwise seem out of bounds or tangential. On theintersection of consumerism and citizenship, in a study for the Pew CharitableTrusts assessing the civic health of the nation, Scott Keeler, Cliff Zukin, MollyAndolina, and Krista Jenkins call consumerism the “unexplored path of engage-ment.” Reporting the results of surveys on civic engagement with four generationsof Americans, they note surprisingly that 49 percent of respondents made retailpurchasing decisions in the past year based on social and political concerns. Theyobserve that, “with the exception of registration and voting, consumer activism ispracticed by more people than any other civic or political behavior asked about inthis survey.”59 Keller et al. call for more research into contemporary consumeractivism. To be sure, such research is warranted; however, even as they recognize theintersections of consumerism and activism, Keeler et al. treat this activity as adiscrete category of participation that can be compared to voting and volunteering.The subtleties of ostensibly transparent coffee purchases suggest the difficulties ofdelineating a discrete category based on acts themselves. Moreover, proceeding in


this way would effectively abstract activities whose very recognition depends on anappreciation of contexts, even when these contexts are revealed only in the answersof survey respondents. The fluidity, multimodality, and quotidian qualities of actionsare better appreciated when their processual character is considered.

Conclusion: Taking Discourse Seriously

I have advanced a reorientation in scholarly approaches to citizenship and civicengagement from asking questions of what to asking questions of how. In this spirit,I have proposed a discourse theory that conceptualizes citizenship as a mode ofpublic engagement. A discourse theory of citizenship may offer one way to articulatepublic subjectivity affirmatively. Attention to modalities of citizenship distinguishesacts from enactment, thereby recognizing that practices may express differentmeanings and significance for agents and audiences in different situations. Thisavoids a priori conceptual restrictions of citizenship to certain people, places, andtopics. I have presented foci for engaging citizenship engagement. These foci,however, should not be viewed as identical to citizenship engagement because thiswould return scholarship to questions of constitution. I have also argued thattheorizing citizenship as a mode of public engagement extends and multiplies ourunderstanding of citizenship and appreciates differences—social, legal, political,economic—more than theorizing citizenship as the possession of citizens.

A discourse theory of citizenship takes discourse seriously. This seemingly tauto-logical statement is important because in both scholarly and popular assessmentsdiscourse is too often regarded as prefatory to genuine action. According to thisview, talk is cheap, and talk is a bargain only insofar as it leads to activities such asvoting and volunteering. Citizenship should not be reserved for special occasions,however. Discourse practices present potentially accessible and powerful everydayenactments of citizenship. Even regular voters can vote only periodically, and mostpeople cannot undertake volunteering as a full-time job. By contrast, discoursepractices suggest a frequency and sustainability to civic engagement. Taking dis-course seriously means treating discourse expansively. Discourse may entail talk, butit also involves other modes of symbolic expression. The examples referenced in thisessay illustrate the multimodality of discourse and citizenship engagement. Finally,a discourse theory of citizenship presents some resistance against too easily adoptinga decline thesis. Assessing the vibrancy of civic engagement depends in part on whereone looks. The power of citizenship engagement arises in important respects from itscapacity to refashion social norms and beliefs and to recast nonpolitical activities aspolitical.

Notes

[1] Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (NewYork: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 45, 60–64. See also Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding Politics: HowAmericans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

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For an overview of these debates, see Civic Engagement in American Democracy, ed. ThedaSkocpol and Morris P. Fiorina (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1999).

[2] Putnam, Bowling Alone, 341.[3] 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 Commissionon Civic Renewal, 1998), http://www.puaf.umd.edu/Affiliates/CivicRenewal/finalreport/table of contentsfinal report.htm. See also Robert K. Fullinwider, ed., Civil Society, Democ-racy, and Civic Renewal (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999).

[4] Matthew Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg, Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined ItsCitizens and Privatized Its Public (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 21.

[5] Everett Carll Ladd, The Ladd Report (New York: Free Press, 1999), 31–43, 49–52.[6] Carmen Sirianni and Lewis Friedland, Civic Innovation in America: Community Empower-

ment, Public Policy, and the Movement for Civic Renewal (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 2001), 17. See also Francesca Polletta, Freedom Is an Endless Meeting: Democracy inAmerican Social Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

[7] Robert Wuthnow, Loose Connections: Joining Together in America’s Fragmented Communities(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 31–57.

[8] My reference to an “investigative tendency” is meant to indicate a prevalent approach to civicengagement, not an all-encompassing perspective. For an exception to this approach, seeGerard 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.

[9] This is not a methodological point. Citizenship may be studied usefully from both socialscientific and humanistic perspectives. My reference to counting refers to the question “whatcounts as citizenship?” which, as I argue in this essay, unfortunately directs our attention toacts of citizenship and away from action.

[10] Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American CivicLife (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003), 226.

[11] A discourse theory signals an affiliation with theoretical efforts to conceptualize the publicsphere as a social space created through discourse. From this perspective, specific sites mayhost public spheres, but these sites are not identical with the public sphere per se. Forexample, see Jurgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theoryof Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technol-ogy Press, 1996); Gerard A. Hauser, Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and PublicSpheres (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999); Michael Warner, Publics andCounterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002).

[12] Daniel C. Brouwer, “ACT-ing UP in Congressional Hearings,” in Counterpublics and theState, ed. Robert Asen and Daniel C. Brouwer (Albany: State University of New York Press,2001), 87–109.

[13] Susan Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery, and Women’s Political Identity(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

[14] 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.

[15] Ronald Walter Greene, “Citizenship in a Global Context: Towards a Future Beginning for aCultural Studies Inspired Argumentation Theory,” in Arguing Communication and Culture,ed. G. Thomas Goodnight (Washington, DC: National Communication Association, 2002),100–101.

[16] For an engaging discussion of these issues, see James Bohman, “Citizenship and Norms ofPublicity: Wide Public Reason in Cosmopolitan Societies,” Political Theory 27 (1999):176–202.

[17] See, for example, Linda Hutcheon, “The Politics of Representation,” Signature: A Journal ofTheory and Canadian Literature 1 (1989): 23–44.


[18] 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 theState, 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.

[19] Amy Gutmann, Identity in Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).[20] Iris Marion Young, “Difference as a Resource for Democratic Communication,” in Deliber-

ative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics, ed. James Bohman and William Rehg(Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1997), 389.

[21] Rita Felski, Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (New York: New YorkUniversity Press, 2000), 127.

[22] Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public (1925; reprint, New Brunswick, NJ: TransactionPublishers, 1993), 28.

[23] Lippmann, Phantom Public, 14.[24] Lippmann, Phantom Public, 29.[25] 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 notadvocating Dewey’s theory of citizenship.

[26] 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, “TheMultiple Mr. Dewey: Multiple Publics and Permeable Borders in John Dewey’s Theory of thePublic Sphere,” Argumentation and Advocacy 39 (2003): 174–188; William Caspary, Dewey onDemocracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000); Robert B. Westbrook, John Deweyand American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).

[27] Dewey, “Creative Democracy,” 225.[28] John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (1927; reprint, Athens, OH: Swallow Press, 1954),

148.[29] Dewey, “Creative Democracy,” 227.[30] Dewey, Public and Its Problems, 152.[31] 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.

[32] Dewey, Public and Its Problems, 183.[33] Dewey, Public and Its Problems, 183.[34] 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).[35] Dewey, “Creative Democracy,” 228.[36] 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: SouthernIllinois University Press, 1991), 299.

[37] My suggestion that scholars may wish to defer the question of constitution represents achange in my perspective. In a recent Alta paper, I identified these foci as constitutivequalities of citizenship. See Robert Asen, “Notes on a Discourse Theory of Citizenship” inCritical Problems in Argumentation (13th NCA/AFA Conference on Argumentation, Alta,Utah, August 2003), ed. Charles Willard (forthcoming, 2004). I have since come to theconclusion that identifying constitutive qualities of citizenship almost invariably leads totypological discussions of whether a specific practice is or is not an act of citizenship, whichraises the problems of counting citizenship.

[38] Along these lines, Darrin Hicks holds that a key promise of models of deliberative democracyis a promise of inclusion, which is an important basis of legitimacy. Darrin Hicks, “The

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Promise(s) of Deliberative Democracy,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 5 (2002): 224–229. Seealso John Dryzek, “Legitimation and Economy in Deliberative Democracy,” Political Theory29 (2001): 651–669.

[39] Alcoff and Gray call for continued engagement to “transform arrangements of speaking tocreate spaces where survivors are authorized to be both witnesses and experts, both reportersof experience and theorists of experience. Such transformations will alter existing subjectiv-ities as well as structures of domination and relations of power.” Linda Alcoff and LauraGray, “Survivor Discourse: Transgression or Recuperation?” Signs: Journal of Women inCulture and Society 18 (1993): 287.

[40] 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.

[41] Quoted in John Butler, “Carol Moseley-Braun’s Day to Talk about Race: A Study of Forumin the United States Senate,” Argumentation and Advocacy 32 (1995): 70. The details of thisdebate are more complicated than I have sketched in this paragraph. For a fuller account aswell as a trenchant analysis, see Butler’s article.

[42] On the connections between deliberation and trust, see Gerard A. Hauser and ChantalBenoit-Barne, “Reflections on Rhetoric, Deliberative Democracy, Civil Society, and Trust,”Rhetoric and Public Affairs 5 (2002): 261–275.

[43] Along these lines, Gerard Hauser holds that “for democracy to be a functional form ofgovernance in a society of strangers, citizens must learn how to engage difference in a waythat 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 UniversityPress, 1994), 25–73; Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality(New York: Basic Books, 1983), 249–280.

[44] 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,” inHabermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology Press, 1992), 51–72.

[45] In light of my previous claim that the foci for approaching citizenship engagement need notbe treated as an inseparable set, it may be useful to identify this sentence as a recommenda-tion for scholarly inquiry. As I argue in this paragraph, holding risk and commitment intension represents more dynamically the modality of citizenship than focusing on one or theother.

[46] On the value of play as a framework for studying communicative practices, see CatherineHelen Palczewski, “Argument in an Off Key: Playing with the Productive Limits ofArgument,” in Arguing Communication and Culture, ed. G Thomas Goodnight (Washington,DC: National Communication Association, 2002), 1–23.

[47] 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,” CriticalInquiry 9 (1983): 685–723; Tyler Hoffman, “Treacherous Laughter: The Poetry Slam, SlamPoetry, and the Politics of Resistance,” Studies in American Humor 3 (2001): 49–64; LindaHutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1989); Robert E. Terrill,“Irony, Silence, and Time: Frederick Douglass on the Fifth of July,” Quarterly Journal ofSpeech 89 (2003): 216–234.

[48] An analysis of Andrew’s Web site could compose a journal article. I mention it here as a briefillustration of how citizenship engagement may be explored for its creative expression. Seehttp://www.jobsforjohn.com


[49] See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread ofNationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991); Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transform-ation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. ThomasBurger (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).

[50] Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (1961; reprint,New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 220–221.

[51] Ronald Beiner, Political Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 132.[52] Arendt, Between Past and Future, 221.[53] On the limits of perspective-taking, see Iris Marion Young, “Asymmetrical Reciprocity: On

Moral Respect, Wonder, and Enlarged Thought,” Constellations 3 (1997): 340–363.[54] Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “citizenship,” www.dictionary.oed.com/entrance.dtl[55] 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 ofDemocracy, 2nd ed. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996). For histories ofcitizenship practices in the U.S., see Michael Schudson, The Good Citizen: A History ofAmerican Civic Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); Rogers M. Smith, CivicIdeals: 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, Citizenshipand 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 (Thou-sand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1997).

[56] 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 areasinform enactments of citizenship. For an insightful collection of essays addressing connec-tions between citizenship and gender, see Kathleen B. Jones, ed., “Special Issue: Citizenshipin Feminism: Identity, Action, Locale,” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 12 (1997):1–197.

[57] Kevin Phillips, Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich (New York:Broadway Books, 2002), 114–138.

[58] Paul Krugman, “For Richer: How the Permissive Capitalism of the Boom DestroyedAmerican Equality,” New York Times Magazine, 20 October 2002, 67, 76.

[59] Scott Keeler, Cliff Zukin, Molly Andolina, and Krista Jenkins, The Civic and Political Healthof the Nation: A Generational Portrait (College Park, MD: The Center for Information andResearch on Civic Learning and Engagement, 2002), 20. Nestor Garcia Canclini holds thatchanges 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 con-sumption. Garcia Canclini explains that “if consumption was once a site of more or lessunilateral decisions, it is today a space of interaction where producers and senders no longersimply seduce their audience; they also have to justify themselves rationally.” Nestor GarciaCanclini, Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 45, 39. For a contrary perspective, see Juliet Schor, DoAmericans Shop Too Much? ed. Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000).

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