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Wijkprofiel: the thermometer of Rotterdam
A poststructuralist analysis of a policy measurement tool
Name: T. Dominicus
Student Number: 10099174/6360343
University: University of Amsterdam
Study: Political Science – International Relations
Elective: European Security Politics
Thesis supervisor: dr. B. İşleyen
Second reader: dr. J.M.J. Doomernik
3 Table of content
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Table of Content
List of abbreviations p. 7
1. Introduction p. 9
2. State of the Art//Art of the State p. 12
2.1 Critical security studies p. 12
2.2 Urban sociology p. 14
2.3 Schinkel’s contribution to critical sociology p. 15
2.4 Politics of Measurement p. 16
2.5 Urban and social geography p. 19
3. Going down the Foucauldian rabbit hole p. 20
3.1 Foucault: discipline and biopolitics p. 20
3.2 Governmentality: Foucault and beyond p. 24
3.3 Schinkel’s understanding of society p. 30
4. Methods for meaning p. 33
4.1 Case selection and data gathering p. 33
4.2 Critical Discourse Analysis p. 35
4.3 Foucault and Discourse p. 36
4.4 Derrida on the ethic of deconstruction p. 38
4.5 Said on Contrapuntal Reading p. 41
4.6 Conclusion p. 43
5. The empirical strikes back p. 44
5.1 Introducing the Wijkprofiel p. 44
5.2 To see or not to see: that’s the question p. 46
5.3 The Art of Techne p. 54
5.4 The subject and the self p. 61
5.5 Essence of Episteme p. 65
5.6 Conclusion p. 68
6. Conclusion, discussion and beyond p. 69
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List of abbreviations
ANT – Actor-Network Theory
CDA – Critical Discourse Analysis
INP – Information model Dutch Police
NAP – Normal Amsterdam Level
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1. Introduction
‘The Wijkprofiel connects the hard numbers and the experience of the inhabitant of Rotterdam. That is valuable’, states the mayor of Rotterdam Ahmed Aboutaleb on the website of the Wijkprofiel (Website Gemeente Rotterdam 2019a).1 The Wijkprofiel is a policy instrument, developed in 2014 by the municipality of Rotterdam with the goal to measure the neighbourhoods and the Rotterdam society. As the municipality writes on the website of the Wijkprofiel, this instrument is as a thermometer to observe the status of fourteen areas and seventy-one neighbourhoods (Website Gemeente Rotterdam 2019a). The goal of the Wijkprofiel is to give public policy makers, the municipality council and other stakeholders objective data which they can use in the development of public policy.
The use of index measurements in the Netherlands is not new, especially not in Rotterdam. As Uitermark et al argue, the method of quantifying and ranking neighbourhoods in line with thinking of New Public Management has been deployed in Rotterdam since the beginning of the twentieth first century (Uitermark et al 2017: 63). There has been the Liveability and the Safety Index, two measurement tools which are deployed to make society and policy more knowable. But where Uitermark et al look at how these measurement tools are used as legitimation for public policy or look at their effects in multiple policies, I focus in this thesis on the construction of one specific measurement tool: the Wijkprofiel (Uitermark et al 2017).
My research question is: how is the Wijkprofiel as a measurement index produced? As you could distillate from the first word of my research question, I am not interested in a causal relationship between X and Y or in the genesis of this policy tool. These kinds of ideas and ideals form the heliocentric centre of positivist scholarship, a universe I left behind. Instead, I lead you in this thesis through the ideas of poststructuralist and postcolonial thinkers who shook the foundation of positivist social sciences. The goal of my thesis is to introduce you with the ideas of these schools of thoughts and to show what the benefits are of this kind of analysis for political scientists and scholars of public policy.
Although poststructuralist scholars are sometimes portrayed as chaotic, I have structured my thesis in an orderly way. After this introduction I discuss the state of the art of scholarly debates which are related to my field of research. These relations can be based on theories, methodology or case studies. The studies I discuss are not by definition bounded to one discipline; I agree with the strength of engaging in debate with scholars beyond the
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boundaries of disciplines. Therefore I introduce the work of scholars in the fields of critical security studies, Foucault studies, urban sociology, critical sociology and political geography and try to build bridges beyond classic divisions within academic knowledge production. After the discussion of the state of the art, I outline my theoretical framework. In this thesis, I use Foucauldian and other poststructuralist theories and methods to show how this governance tool is produced and practised. To do that, I use the concept of governmentality, as it is developed by Foucault. One of the leading scholars in Foucauldian studies, Mitchell Dean developed an analytical grid for the study of conduct of conduct. Dean defines analytics of government as ‘a type of study concerned with an analysis of the specific conditions under which particular entities emerge, exist and change’ (Dean 2008: 20). I outline the model he develops in his work and argue why I think this is the best theoretical model to understand how the Wijkprofiel as a measurement tool is produced.
In my methodological chapter, I outline various methods which are crucial for poststructuralist research. Thinkers such as the French philosophers Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida contributed to humanities and social sciences with their focusses on the importance of discourse as a structure which exists of power relations. Therefore I give attention to what discourse is and what an ethos of deconstruction is. Discourse is not just language; discourse produces a social reality. I use the methods of Critical Discourse Analysis as developed by (amongst others) Ruth Wodak. Thereafter, I deploy the model for analytics of government as developed on the basis of the work of Dean (2008) and İşleyen (2015) on the empirical data of the Wijkprofiel. My empirical chapter is structured along the four dimensions that Dean distinguishes for the analytics of government.
With this thesis I try to contribute to public and scholarly debates on what public policy measurement instruments are and what they deploy. The scholarly contribution of this thesis is two folded. First, I show how the construction of the Wijkprofiel as a technique of government works. Where other scholars look at the effects of measurements instruments for public policy, I focus on the construction of this tool. Second, I look at the Wijkprofiel, a young policy tool which has not been studied before. Where other scholars look at kindred tools, such as the Safety or Liveability Index or the Amsterdam Neighbourhood Profile, the Wijkprofiel is a new case to study which can tell us more about the construction of these kinds of policy techniques (Uitermark et al 2017; De Wilde and Franssen 2016).
My contribution to the public debate lies in the fact that I show that the construction of measurement tools is not a pure technical project. Rather, as Mandy de Wilde and Thomas Franssen argue in their article on the Amsterdam Neighbourhood Policy, the choices in and
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production of quantified tools are political processes (De Wilde and Franssen 2016: 491). Therefore, I see it as the task of scholars and intellectuals to show how political practices work, especially practices which try to hide behind a wall called objectivity or neutrality.
Maybe you observed it already, maybe not, but while reading this thesis, you will see that I feel attracted to the ideas and ethical standards of Michel Foucault. This does not mean that he is a saint; it should be an insult for him if scholars would treat his work without critique. But I would lie if I say that I can phrase the task of scholars or intellectuals more eloquent then him.
‘But I believe that political power also exercises itself through the mediation of a certain number of institutions which look as if they have nothing in common with the political power, and as if they are independent of it, while they are not. (…) It seems to me that the real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the working of institutions, which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticize and attack them in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them’ Michel Foucault (1974: 40-41).
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2. State of the Art//Art of the State
In this chapter, I will provide an overview of the state of the art of the academic literature dealing with debates that touch the subject of my research. This is an overview of multiple academic debates which are covering parts of my research topic on the basis of theory, methodology and case study selection, but are still leaving a gap in the academic literature which this thesis wants to fill. The literature that I discuss derives from critical security studies, Foucault studies, urban sociology, critical sociology and political geography. The most important authors from these fields that I use are Michel Foucault, Loïc Wacquant, Willem Schinkel, Justus Uitermark, Cody Hochstenbach and Wouter van Gent.
2.1 Critical Security Studies
One of the most important and contested concepts within the field of critical security studies is security itself. Within the academic discipline of critical security studies there can be distinguished (at least) two important schools. The first school is the so called Copenhagen School with Barry Buzan, Ole Waever and Marc de Wilde as most important contributors. These scholars define, in their work Security: A New Framework for Analysis, security as a speech act; an act committed by securitizing actors (mostly influential politicians) which places the referent object outside the realm of politics (Buzan et al 1998: 36). The objects of analysis for research that follow the theoretical foundations of the Copenhagen School are the discourses that these securitizing actors use. The other important school in critical security studies is the Paris School. The scholars working in this tradition (most prominent Didier Bigo) are for a large part influenced by multiple French sociologist and philosophers, such as Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault.
There are several important shifts made in the understanding and studying of security between the Copenhagen school and the Paris School. First, where the Copenhagen School analyse security as an essential concept, the Paris School treats security as a technique of government (C.A.S.E. 2005: 457). Second, where the Copenhagen School tries to investigate the intensions behind the use of power and the process of securitization, the Paris School doesn’t believe in the role of researchers as unveilers of truth intention, but those more interested in the effects of the power struggles in certain fields (C.A.S.E. 2005: 457). Lastly, the Copenhagen School focuses on speech acts and the Paris School ‘emphasizes practices, audiences and contexts that enable and constrain the production of specific forms of governmentality’ (C.A.S.E. 2005: 457).
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Following on the outlining of the central ideas in the Paris School of security studies, it is important to refer to the works that have developed one of the central concepts within this field: governmentality. This concept is (for the first time) used by Foucault in his lectures at the Collège de France from 1978, published as Security, Territory, Population. From the moment that Foucault developed this concept, there has been a broad scholarly debate around the concept of governmentality. He discussed the development of neoliberal governmentality in his lectures at the Collège de France in 1979, published as The Birth of Biopolitcs (2013). Important contributors to the academic debates on the concept of governmentality are Mitchell Dean (2008; 2013), Thomas Lemke (2001), Nikolas Rose (1999), Miller and Rose (2008) and Rose, O’Malley and Valverde (2009). An interesting usage of the different concepts of governmentality (and especially the difference between liberal and neoliberal governmentality) can be found in the work of Beste İşleyen (2015).
Foucault’s works on governmentality are not his only philosophical contributions in which power plays a central role. Another important concept he developed is biopower, which can be divided in discipline on the one hand and biopolitics on the other. The concept of discipline Foucault developed in his book Discipline and Punish, however he outlined his most important ideas about biopolitics in his lectures at the Collège de France in 1976, named Society must be defended, and in his first volume on the history of sexuality, The Will to Knowledge (Foucault 1978; 1995; 2003). Central to the thoughts about biopower are the ideas about which techniques of governing are used to construct the living body (as an individual or as a population) as a subject of power which can be controlled or managed. These techniques of governing are present in all different aspects of human live, so since the development of these ideas, they have been used in several academic debates, ranging from ideas about colonialism and health, the development and use of statistics to research on risk and criminality. Important contributors to these debates up until now are (amongst others) Thomas Lemke, Paul Rabinow & Nikolas Rose and Ian Hacking (Lemke 2011; Rabinow and Rose 2016; Hacking 2016). Didier Bigo also engaged with the different aspects of biopower in his research on security and risk (Bigo 2008).
With this thesis, I will contribute in multiple ways to the academic debates on governmentality, biopower and Foucault studies. First, I will show on the basis of empirical data how the construction and the mapping of a certain territory and population in Rotterdam is being done. I show what the power effects are of the used surveys and statistics and which political subject they create. Second, I will show how different fields of security (such as social security and criminality) are related to each other in statistics and are used in a network
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of governance. Third, I contribute to a broader debate on what policing actually means in contemporary society. As Mitchell Dean argued on the basis of Foucault’s lectures, a genealogy of policing shows that one task of the police is ‘to take population and the numbers of the inhabitants within the state as its object’ (Dean 2013: 107). The goal of the Wijkprofiel can be seen as mapping the population and the individual in a certain neighbourhood to, in the end, govern them via a network of policies. In the theoretical framework, I will outline in more details what the ideas about biopower are and which definitions will be used in this research.
2.2 Urban sociology
My thesis can also be situated within a broader academic debate on urban sociology, especially the work of the French sociologist Loïc Wacquant. What defines urban sociology from, let’s say, sociology in general, is that it sees the city as a structure, as the object and the subject of analysis. It looks at how cities are being made, who live in these spaces and what are the effects of these densely populated spaces on the populations who live in it (Sassen 2010). The Wijkprofiel is a tool to construct the city as a territory, inhabited by a population, who have characteristics that are problematized as ‘urban problems’ (I go further on this in the empirical part). These problematizations are part of a technique of governing, as outlined in the part on governmentality. An important research topic in contemporary urban sociology is that of in- and exclusion of populations from cities (Sassen 2014). This thesis engages with this debate, because the Wijkprofiel is a tool to manage the mobility of populations and problems in certain neighbourhoods in Rotterdam. This policy tool is also used as a legitimation to intervene in housing policies with the explicit goal to gentrify neighbourhoods in Rotterdam South.
One of the leading scholars in the field of urban sociology is the French sociologist Loïc Wacquant. With his two books Punish the Poor and Urban Outcast, he has shown how neoliberal social policies have been developed in two specific countries (France and the US) and their result of marginalization and repression of working classes and racialized minorities (Wacquant 2001; 2008; 2009). Although his research is mostly imbedded within the theoretical framework of Durkheim and Bourdieu, his work gives an overview of the structural transformations of social policies since the 1980’s within the northern Atlantic world without losing eye for national differences.
Where Wacquant looks more to the structural transformations (such as the rise of neoliberalism, the decline of the welfare state, the deproletarization of poor black people in
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the US) within a longer timeframe, in my thesis I look at the power effects of one specific policy tool, in one specific policy project in the city of Rotterdam on a specific moment in time. Another difference is that Wacquant shows how mechanisms of in- and exclusion in racialized territory in the US and France have changed over time and what the causalities were in these changes. I don’t look at the why or by what these techniques of governing changed, but instead ask questions about the particular effects of these power constellations. The third difference between the works of Wacquant on the politics of segregation and the techniques of governing that are developed in social policy (and in the creation of the Wijkprofiel in particular) is that Western European states have different techniques of governing of marginalized poor populations than in the US. Justus Uitermark argues (on the basis of the figurational sociology of Nobert Elias and the governmentality theories of Foucault) that ‘the relatively strong interdependencies between central state and deprived neighbourhoods have created conditions under which segregation and the development of no-go areas are regarded as major threats, not just to the residents of areas of relegation but to entire societies. In response, local and national administrators, in conjunction with their partners, have developed a range of governmentalities to frame and curb these threats. What ties these heterogeneous governmentalities together is the idea and aspiration of integration, both of lower-class minorities and the territories where they reside.’ (Uitermark 2014: 1422). Uitermark argues, in direct response to Wacquant, that where in the US residential segregation is used as a technique of governing to control and neutralize the poor through enclosure, in Western Europe a technique of integration is being used to govern marginalized urban populations (Uitermark 2014: 1419). In another article in collaboration with Cody Hochstenbach and Wouter van Gent, Uitermark argues that ‘from an international perspective, it may seem extraordinary that deprived groups are excluded not from areas of privilege but from areas of deprivations.’ (Uitermark et al: 2017: 61). This must also be read as a contribution to the academic debate about the governance of urban populations.
2.3 Schinkel’s contribution to critical sociology
Another debate to which I want to contribute with this thesis is that of critical sociology which mostly engage with the topic of integration. One of the most influential voices in this debate is Willem Schinkel, professor of Social Theory at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam. With multiple books and articles (2008a; 2008b; 2010; 2011; 2013; 2014; 2017; 2018; Boersma and Schinkel 2015; Schrover and Schinkel 2013) he criticises mainstream sociology and looks critically how society is discursively constructed in sociological research
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and policy documents on integration. He argues that speaking about integration is a form of diagrammar, a discourse that produces different entities that can’t be united. As Schinkel argues in his book Imagined Societies: A Critique of Immigrant Integration in Western Europe ‘“Society” may not be the basic entity of social life, an encompassing home to all that is social, or at least a national address thereof. But it is, or rather does something, it is an active form of social imagination, and this activity should be accounted for in social theory’ (Schinkel 2017: 220). This not only counts for social theory, but also for policies and statistical knowledge that tries to produce a social reality of which a lot of times is argued that it is objective. Schinkel delivers the theoretical ideas to critically look at the production of social imaginations in the Wijkprofiel and the assumptions that are underlying these representations.
In his book Denken in een tijd van sociale hypochondrie Schinkel also engages with the debate outlined before, about the role of policing and the production of a knowable living subject (Schinkel 2008a). Where this work and his other works are about the social imagination of society in relation to the diagrammar of integration, it can also be used as methodological glasses to look at the empirical data of this thesis. As I will outline in my theoretical framework, his ideas about the representation and controlling of order which are the foundations of the social imagination of society are useful to study my case.
2.4 Politics of Measurement
My thesis also contributes to the scientific debate around critical social policy and the politics of measurement. In their article ‘The material practices of quantification’, Mandy de Wilde and Thomas Franssen look at the practices of the quantified object ‘Normal Amsterdam Level’ (NAP). They argue that the use of these kinds of indicators and indexes in social policy must be understood as a technique of governance which enables governments to govern from a distance (De Wilde and Franssen 2016: 489-490). These authors also engage in a debate with Mirko Noordegraaf who observed a trend in social policy to ‘management by measurement’, a trend in which ‘measurement methods such as performance rankings, monitoring, cost–benefit ratios, risk assessments, benchmarking, quality measurement, and score cards, and their results are used to get a grip on – to control and manage […] highly ambiguous social phenomena like well-being, social cohesion, crime and safety (Noordegraaf 2008: 222, cited in: De Wilde and Franssen 2016: 490).
The work of De Wilde and Franssen is an important contribution to the academic debate on statistical knowledge production and their use in social policy. First, they argue
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‘that it is important to notice and unpack the quantified tools that constitute policies by describing how they are made and used in policy’ (De Wilde and Franssen 2016: 491). By engaging in a critical manner with their research object, they show how the policies of making indexes work. Second, in their article they point to the fact that these practices of index formations ‘can be taken from one context to another while still creating facts about the neighbourhoods that are included in it’ (De Wilde and Franssen 2016: 492). They argue that these practices can best understood if they are embedded in the concept of device as it is developed in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). Their ideas are embedded in Actor-Network Theory (ANT) as developed by (amongst others) Bruno Latour.
As De Wilde and Franssen state ‘this article is first and foremost an explorative case study of a particular index in which the empirical material serves to highlight the importance of understanding indexes as part and parcel of policy practices’ (De Wilde and Franssen 2016: 494). In the light of this statement the contribution of my thesis to this academic debate can best be understood. In the first place, I offer another explorative case study of a particular index, the Wijkprofiel. Second, where De Wilde and Franssen follow, first, the formation through time of the NAP and, second, the route that the NAP takes trough different policy fields, I offer a more in-depth analysis of the particular construction of the Wijkprofiel as a policy index than they do with the NAP.
Mirko Noordegraaf also contributed to the debate on public policy and measurement techniques. In his article ‘Meanings of measurement’ he looks at the development and use of the Rotterdam Safety Index (2008: 222). In the conclusion, Noordegraaf states that ‘the interesting issue here is not so much statistical composition and measurement forms, and well-designed systems and good use, but the instrument’s paradoxical status in the light of contested and ambiguous issues that are to be solved. On the one hand, it is a simple method for making things tangible. On the other hand, these ‘things’ – that is, safety, liveability – are intangible, ambiguous, and hard to grasp. Although such as Index is full of meaning, it might quickly become meaningless, not only because the instrument is constrained, controversial, and might produce contra-productive effects, but because instruments themselves will never solve ambiguity.’ (Noordegraaf 2008: 236).
With this quote from his conclusion, it is possible to show what the imbrications are between the research in this thesis and the research of Noordegraaf and where these imbrications are not. First, Noordegraaf’s article is a contribution to the debate on measurement techniques and their role in public policy. He looks at how the Safety Index is being used in public policy and political debates in Rotterdam, especially in the period after
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2002. On this point, there is a bridge between his work and my research on the Wijkprofiel. This connection is even more important, because the Rotterdam Safety Index transformed through the years into the Wijkprofiel. Second, Noordegraaf argued that in the process of constructing the Safety Index, ‘many problems in Rotterdam were drawn into the domain of Safety Politics, and [so] […] the Safety Index became the prime indicator for assessing the urban state of affairs’ (Noordegraaf 2008: 229). He shows that the field of safety politics is not a put in concrete, but that discursively bridges could be built to bring (amongst others) topics, policy makers and subjects into the domain of security politics. This is also one of the central points of research in my thesis and so it can be an empirical contribution to this debate. Third, Noordegraaf discusses the historical formation of statistical knowledge and its role in state formation processes (Noordegraaf 2008: 223). Although he doesn’t give much attention to these processes, it is a perspective at what statistics are and how they are used wherein I want to embed my research.
Notwithstanding, there are also differences between the work of Noordegraaf and mine. First, he works mostly within the scope of mainstream public policy, where I want to contribute to the debate on the basis of critical theories, such as Foucauldian studies. An example of Noordegraaf’s argument is that he argues that ‘the Index was related to real events and experiences that were considered to be legitimate in changing local climates’ (Noordegraaf 2008: 236). He meanders within his article from some critical insights (as the role of statistics in state formation) to some more positivist notions, such as his statement on ‘real events’. A second point of critique comes from De Wilde and Franssen, who argued that ‘where Noordegraaf (2008) argues that indexes and their usage cannot be detached from broader socio-political conditions, we show that it is exactly the ease with which indexes like this can detached and can travel between different policy and political contexts that makes them such important actors in social policy’ (De Wilde and Franssen 2016: 507). This point of critique is related to the earlier point of not completely accepting the assumptions and theories of critical theory and still working within the framework of mainstream social public policy. He describes the Index as a tool in the hands of actors who can make it meaningful and, by this way of arguing, neglect the power relations that are in the discursive formation of these indexes. Third, where Noordegraaf discusses in his article multiple mechanisms of how indexes are made full of meaning, he doesn’t go any deeper in the empirical data by showing how this exactly goes. In my research I go deeper into the empirical data and, through discursive analysis and deconstruction of the text, show what the power mechanisms at work in the index that is my case study, the Wijkprofiel, are.
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There are several social geographers contributing to academic debates which are connected with the research in my thesis. This is done on a theoretical level, a methodological level and empirical level. The most important contributors are Justus Uitermark, Cody Hochstenbach and Wouter van Gent. In their article ‘The statistical politics of exceptional territories’, they place their research within the ‘emerging body of critical data studies that aims to uncover the inner workings and effects of corporate and state practices including surveillance, profiling and social sorting in seemingly innocuous processes of gathering, analysing and reporting data.’ (Uitermark et al 2017: 61). The aim of their article is to show how power dynamics in the construction of exceptional territories work. Their attention mostly goes to the construction, mobilization and interpretation of statistics as a technique of governance. Their empirical contribution to the academic debate lie in the use of Foucauldian concepts of power, such as sovereignty, discipline and biopower, and show how they come into practice in the case of the Act on Extraordinary Measures for Urban Problems, better known as Rotterdam Law (Uitermark et al 2017: 60-62). They looked at how the Safety Index and the Livability Index are produced and used as a practice to produce “exceptional” neighbourhoods (Uitermark et al 2017: 65-66). Although they delve deep into the construction of these statistics and their use in the Rotterdam Law, they do not give much attention to the exact construction of these indexes. They do not look at what questions are raised in these surveys and they give a minimum of attention to the norms that are seen as good in the questionnaires. This is the gap that I fill through the use of discourse analysis and deconstruction in my study of the empirical data.
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3. Going down the Foucauldian rabbit hole
In this chapter, I continue with the development of my theoretical and conceptual framework. Some elements are already known, because I touched upon some concepts in the chapter on the state of the art. The goal of this chapter is to dig deeper in poststructuralist theories than I did in former chapter. As the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze expressed in an intellectual conversation with Michel Foucault: ‘A theory is exactly like a box of tools’ (Foucault and Deleuze 1977: 208). The purpose of a theoretical framework is to show which tools I use and argue why I think these tools are most useful to engage with the primary material. It is important to keep in mind that theories and concepts are abstractions, based on ideas and empirical material with the goal to help creating meaning to the objects we try to study and to understand. Also, we must keep in mind that (to stay in the Deleuzian terms) although a tool can be of good quality (such as a steeled crowbar), the used tool must fit to the material that you are working on. Finally, by using different concepts to understand the empirical data, we can (and sometimes must) polish our academic tools after they engaged with the empirics. So, this chapter can best be understood as a tour through the workshop of the academic craftsman. The outline of this chapter will be as follows. First, I show what multiple Foucauldian concepts (such as biopower and governmentality) are, how they were developed by Foucault and show how other scholars, such as Mitchell Dean, have used them. I show how statistics are a technique of governing and argue that this theoretical framework is the best lens to understand the creation of the Wijkprofiel. Second, I outline several of the conceptual innovations offered by Willem Schinkel and argue why his insights can help us to understand how the concept of society is discursively constructed through indexes such as the Wijkprofiel.
3.1 Foucault: discipline and biopolitics
In the middle of the 1970’s, Foucault developed several works in which he gave a genealogy of techniques of governing. He argues that there has been a shift from sovereign power to biopower. The central idea about sovereign power is that the sovereign has power over life in the way that it can let live or make death (Cisney and Morar 2016: 2; Lemke 2011: 35). From the seventeenth century, there has been a transition to biopower. What became central in the practices of power was the creation of live and the idea of let die. Or, as Foucault argued: ‘For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question’ (Foucault 1978: 136). Biopower brought life into the realm of
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politics and tried to manage it through calculations.
Biopower can be divided into two poles. On the one hand there is discipline. This power technique emerged in the seventeenth century, functions at a micro-level, and functions as ‘an anatomo-politics of the human body’ (Foucault 1978: 139). The object and subject of this power technique is the individual human body. On the same page, Foucault summarized the four characteristics of discipline as he had outlined them in more depth in Discipline and Punish. He argued that the goal of disciplinary power is ‘the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls’ (Foucault 1978: 139). Another inventive characteristic of discipline in comparison to sovereign power is that it tries to rule by referring to norms. Cisney and Morar argue that power does not longer ‘emphasize the law as the product of an arbitrary dictate of the sovereign. Rather it functions under a different type of rule, one located in the natural realm, a norm, legitimated by the sciences’ (Cisney and Morar 2016: 4).
Although I don’t want to go deep into the precise working of discipline as a form of biopower, I want to bring forward the role that architecture plays in the theory developed in Discipline and Punish. The model of the Panopticum, the prison model invented by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, is Foucault’s example for the mechanism of discipline (Foucault 1995: 195). The construction of space is one of the characteristics of discipline as a power mechanism. For example, Foucault argues that ‘an administrative and political space was articulated upon a therapeutic space; it tended to individualize bodies, diseases, symptoms, lives and deaths; it constituted a real table of juxtaposed and carefully distinct singularities’ (Foucault 1995: 144). And later on in his book, he states that discipline, through ‘organizing [in] 'cells', 'places' and 'ranks', it create[s] complex spaces that are at once architectural, functional and hierarchical. It is spaces that provide fixed positions and permit circulation; they carve out individual segments and establish operational links; they mark places and indicate values they guarantee the obedience of individuals, but also a better economy of time and gesture’ (Foucault 1995: 148).
It can be argued that this functioning of a society as a disciplinary society has changed. Gilles Deleuze argues that society has transformed from a disciplinary society to a society o f control (Deleuze 1992). Where in the disciplinary society, the power mechanism of discipline was bounded to closed, hierarchical spaces, in the society of control these power mechanisms are more fluid and not bounded to closed spaces such as the prison, the school, the factory or the hospital (Deleuze 1992: 6-7). Nonetheless, both authors point to the role of architecture
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and the production of space as power mechanisms. The production of space through classification is highly political, and so it should also be studied.
The other pole of biopower is known as biopolitics. This form of power-knowledge emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century. Where discipline created the individual human body as the object and subject of power relations, biopolitics creates a new object: the population (Cisney and Morar 2016: 5; Foucault 2003: 242-245). As Cisney and Morar argue, biopolitics is concerned with ‘the regulation and tracking of birthrates (sic), death rates fertility rates, economic and poverty statistics, infant mortality, average longevity, and disease’ (Cisney and Morar 2016: 5). These phenomena operate on a different level than the individual body; they exist on the level of the species-body. Following on the differentiation between discipline and biopolitics, Foucault argues that biopolitics introduced new power mechanisms with other functions which are different from disciplinary mechanisms. ‘The mechanisms introduced by biopolitics include forecasts, statistical estimates and overall measures. And their purpose is not to modify any given phenomenon as such, or to modify a given individual insofar as he is an individual, but, essentially, to intervene at the level at which these general phenomena are determined, to intervene at the level of their generality’ (Foucault 2003: 246). With the development of biopolitics in the eighteen century, the emergence of new disciplines such as statistics, demography and epidemiology was also there. These academic disciplines are intertwined with the notion of biopolitics, because they make it possible to analyse populations as living beings, govern them by practices of correction, exclusion, normalization and optimization (Lemke 2010: 430).
Stuart Elden argues, on the basis of Foucault’s lectures in 1978, that there is a connection between how Foucault understood population as a technique of governing on the one hand, and the construction of territory also as a technique of governing. Where Foucault argues that populations are constructed through statistical means, Elden argues that the strategies that are used on populations are also used on territory: mapping, ordering, measuring, demarcation (Elden 2007: 578). Elden concludes in his article that ‘territory is more than merely land, but a rendering of the emergent concept of ‘space’ as a political category, owned, distributed, mapped, calculated, bordered, and controlled’ (Elden 2007: 578; see also Elden 2010: 810). This connection between two concepts of Foucault (population and territory) is important, because with the Wijkprofiel there is a territory being made (the neighbourhood), inhabited by a population who are (for a large part) the basis of the neighbourhood score.
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racism got a new meaning. Racism has two functions within an economy of biopower. First, it divides what is imagined to be a homogeneous biological whole, such as a population, the human race or a society. A differentiation is being made between the good population and the bad one, one worthy of living and one who must die (Lemke 2011: 41; Foucault 2003: 254). The second function of racism is that it not only draws a dividing line between the worthy and unworthy, but that it creates a dynamic relation in which the survival of the one is dependent on the extermination of the other. As Lemke puts it: ‘It not only allows for a hierarchization of “those who are worthy of living” but also situates the health of one person in a direct relationship with the disappearance of another. It furnishes the ideological foundation for identifying, excluding, combating, and even murdering others, all in the name of improving life’ (Lemke 2011: 42).
With the emergence of biopolitics in the eighteen century and the development of a new form of racism in the nineteenth century, the role of the modern state also changed. The state had to intervene actively in the population called society to govern and control it, to watch over its purity and to confront enemies of society (Lemke 2011: 42). The task of the modern state is, to paraphrase Foucault, to defend society.
Foucault has also been criticized for his analysis of racism. Critiques are that he does not (or just slightly) discuss the question of colonialism (Stoler 2016), that his works on race are Eurocentric (Howel and Richter-Montpetit 2019: 6-7), and that he also does not recognize the mutual relationship between the nation, citizenship and racism (Lemke 2011: 43). On this later point, there have been several academic contributions to improve the usefulness of the concept of racism in contemporary times. From the 1980’s, there has been a rise of ascribing alterity and the creation of differentiated populations on the basis of culture instead of race. The French philosopher Étienne Balibar coined this in 1991 ‘neo-racism’ and others called it ‘cultural racism’ (Balibar 1991; Schinkel 2010: 269). Schinkel describes this discourse of alterity as culturism, ‘an equivalent to racism and amounts to the normative observation based on a supposedly cultural distinction, instead of a natural one, as in the case of racism’ (Schinkel 2010: 269).
In the discourse of racism, blood and soil (better known in German as Blut und Boden) are the markers of alterity. In the discourse of culturism, the language of race disappears to the background (as a result of the European history of the Shoah), but is still present (Jansen 2015: 21). This becomes clear when we look at the terms autochtonen (autochthones) and allochtonen (allochthones) in the Netherlands. Autochthones is the term used for the native, white Dutch population, while allochthones refers to the residents who are ‘foreign born and
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has at least one parent who likewise is born elsewhere or, if born in the Netherlands, have at least one parent to whom this applies’ (Doomernik 2017: 41). Literally, the term autochthones means ‘from this soil’, while allochthones means ‘from strange soil’ (Schinkel 2010: 273; Boersma and Schinkel 2015: 1048-1050). So via this dichotomy, the notion of blood and soil is still present in culturist discourse.
The differentiation that Foucault made between discipline and biopolitics has to be studied with caution. These two types of power are not independent from each other, but are in a mutual constituting relation. Thomas Lemke argued that ‘“individual” and “mass” are not extremes but rather two sides of a global political technology that simultaneously aims at the control of the human as individual body and at the human as species’ (Lemke 2011: 38). On the basis of historical arguments in which he looked at empirical cases in which the power relations on the human body as individual and the human body as population, Foucault developed the concept of dispositif to describe the alliance between these two power relations (Lemke 2011: 38).
The outlined concepts of biopower, biopolitics and discipline show how two important political subjects appeared in modern times: the individual and the population. These subjects are constituted through a power-knowledge nexus as described by Foucault. I also discuss some later comments on Foucault’s ideas and related those to debates on contemporary politics. In the next paragraph, I outline how Foucault developed his conceptual toolbox further at the end of the 1970’s.
3.2 Governmentality: Foucault and beyond
In line with the statement that Foucault made in the last sentence of his introduction in The Archaeology of Knowledge,2 the ideas which Foucault developed changed over time. Where in his lectures from 1975-1976 he was the most radical in his study of power and politics, he shifted his attention away from biopower to a new form of governing: governmentality. After his sabbatical in 1976-1977, he introduced this new concept in his lecture series called Security, Territory, Population. In his lecture on 1st of February 1978, he gave three definitions of governmentality. The first one is: ‘The ensemble formed by institutions, procedures, analyses, and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population, as its principal form of knowledge political economy, and as its essential technical means
2 ‘Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same; leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see
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apparatuses of security’ (Foucault 1994: 219-220; Foucault 2007: 108).
The second definition of governmentality is: ‘The tendency that, over a long period and throughout the West, has steadily led toward the preeminence (sic) over all other forms (sovereignty, discipline, and so on) of this type of power - which may be termed ‘government’ – resulting, on the one hand, in the formation of a whole series of specific governmental apparatuses, and, on the other, in the development of a whole complex of knowledges’ (Foucault 1994: 220; Foucault 2007: 108). The third and last definition that Foucault of governmentality offers is: ‘The process or, rather, the result of the process through which the state of justice of the Middle Ages transformed into the administrative state during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and gradually becomes ‘governmentalized’’ (Foucault 1994: 220; Foucault 2007: 108-109).
Linked to the emergence of his ideas about governmentality was his interest in the history of liberalism as a form of government from the eighteenth century and that of political economy as a distinctive form of knowledge (Lemke 2011: 44-45). Central to the idea of liberalism as a rationality of government is the idea of a nature of society that is the foundation and the border of governmental practices (Lemke 2011: 45). In relation to the ideas about laisser-faire government Foucault gives a new meaning to the concept of technologies of security in comparison to his pre-1978 works. As Lemke argues: ‘Security mechanisms are meant to secure and protect the permanently endangered naturalness of the population, as well as its own forms of free and spontaneous self-regulation’ (Lemke 2011: 47).
Lemke distinguishes, on the basis of Foucault’s work, three different ways of governing by norms. The first one is that of legal regulations; legal normativity operates by laws that codify norms. The second way is discipline, which ‘installs hierarchical differentiations that establish a division between those considered normal and abnormal, suitable and capable, and the others. It functions by designing an optimal model and its operationalization, that is, by employing techniques and procedures to adjust and adapt individuals to this standard’ (Lemke 2011: 47). The third way of governing by norm is through technologies of security. Lemke argues that security represents the opposite of discipline. Discipline starts with the assumption of a prescriptive norm, a norm to which the individual body must adapt, while security takes an empirical norm as a starting point. This empirical norm is constructed with the use of statistical knowledge about a constructed population. The empirical norm serves as a regulative norm; it starts from reality and show the populations how they score in comparison with this norm (Lemke 2011: 47). As Lemke
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concludes: ‘They (security, TD) do not draw an absolute borderline between the permitted and the prohibited; rather, they specify an optimal middle within a spectrum of variations’ (Lemke 2011: 47).
The conclusion that Lemke draws here is on the basis of the lecture which Foucault gave in 1978 and 1979. But for the theoretical framework of this thesis it would be fruitful to compare these ideas about the norm as a technique of governing with what Foucault said in his lectures in 1976. In his lecture on 17 March 1976 Foucault states that ‘there is one element that will circulate between the disciplinary and the regulatory, which will also be applied to body and population alike, which will make it possible to control both the disciplinary order of the body and the aleatory events that occur in the biological multiplicity. The element that circulates between the two is the norm. The norm is something that can be applied to both a body one wishes to discipline and a population one wishes to regularize. […] The normalizing society is a society in which the norm of discipline and the norm of regulation intersect along an orthogonal articulation’ (Foucault 2003: 252-253).
If we compare the two viewpoints, we can conclude that there are some differences. The most important one is that the earlier Foucault does not exclude that in the field of security and biopolitics there can be a prescriptive norm, while Lemke, on the basis of the later work of Foucault, concludes that technologies of security that deals with populations works with empirical norms which are constructed by the use of statistics. As we will see in the empirical part of this thesis, it is, on the one hand, possible to use prescriptive norms for the governance of populations and society, but, on the other, these prescriptive norms are intertwined with statistics and can also be used as descriptive. The conceptual key to understand how this works lies in the elaboration of governmentality.
Mitchell Dean outlines in his book Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society some of the basic concepts around governmentality. Just as Lemke did, he identified three different forms of power in the governmentality grid. Dean argues that the emergence of modern governmentality can be identified through the fact that it takes the population as its object and political economy as its way to understand (Dean 2008: 19). This is the first form of power. The second form is that of sovereignty and discipline. Dean argues that ‘while governmentality retains and utilizes the techniques, rationalities and institutions characteristic of both sovereignty and discipline, it departs from them and seeks to reinscribe and recode them. The object of sovereign power is the exercise of authority over the subjects of the state within a definite territory […]. The object of disciplinary power is the regulation and ordering of numbers of people within territory’ (Dean 2008: 19-20). The third form of power exercised
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with the art of governing is that of the population as its object, governed through the apparatuses of security. These apparatuses include the police, the military, the secret services, etc., but also the health care, education and social welfare systems. To say in other words: it encompasses ‘those institutions and practices concerned to defend, maintain and secure a national population and those that secure the economic demographic and social processes that are found to exist within that population’ (Dean 2008: 20). For the study of governmentality, it is best to see these three forms of power (sovereignty-discipline-government) as interacting within the practices of governing.
For the empirical analysis in this thesis, it is important to see that the governing of social and security policies interact and are intertwined. Francesco Ragazzi argues in his article ‘Countering terrorism and radicalisation: Securitising social policy?’ that there is a process called securitisation of social policy. He conceptualises this as ‘the increased submission of social policy actors and their practices to the logics of security and control’ (Ragazzi 2017: 163). This collaboration between ‘care’ actors and ‘control’ actors in the governing of security is not new; some would even argue it is inextricable from the emergence of biopower. Lucia Zedner quotes in her book Security critical theorist Mark Neocleous who argues that ‘social security can be seen as a form of policing, but conversely, policing might be read as the project of social security’ (cursive in original; Neocleous 2007: 36; cited in: Zedner 2009: 33). Zedner herself shows how for the emergence of social security techniques of governing based on biopower, such as social statistics, were necessary (Zedner 2009: 34).
Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose put discourse analysis at the heart of governmentality studies. As they argue in a straightforward manner: ‘Governmentality has a discursive character: to analyse the conceptualizations, explanations and calculations that inhabit the governmental field requires an attention to language’ (Miller and Rose 2008: 29). They argue that discourse must be seen as a technology of thought, which channels attention to the technical devices of writing, listing, numbering and computing that reproduce a field where discourse is used as a knowable, calculable and administrable object (Miller and Rose 2008: 30).
İşleyen has argued in her article from 2015 that Dean’s approach to the analytics of government is central in several studies of governmentality (İşleyen 2015: 677). Dean conceptualised analytics as ‘a type of study concerned with an analysis of the specific conditions under which particular entities emerge, exist and change’ (Dean 2008: 20). Inspiration for the different dimensions that Dean developed for the analytics of government
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is a Deleuzian understanding of Foucault’s concept of dispositif (Dean 2008: 30). İşleyen differentiated three different aspects of Dean’s analytics of government. The first one is about the ‘field of visibility’, ‘which focuses on the visualisation of government through reports, maps and spatial and temporal arrangements that illuminate certain themes, objects, subjects and their linkages, while concealing alternative visions, relationships and practices’ (İşleyen 2015: 677). Related to this field of visibility is the process of problematization. Where visualisation focuses on illuminating objects and subject for the eye, through critical analysis of the process of problematization, it also becomes clear which objects and subjects are hidden, not directly for the eye, but more in discursive formations. Some issues are constructed as problems and others are not. Problems are not pre-given; they are constructed and made visible, and the process in which this happens can be studied (Miller and Rose 2008: 14). Dean conceptualised problematizations the ‘action of calling into question some aspect of the ‘conduct of conduct’’ (Dean 2008: 27). Marlou Schrover comes on the basis of Foucault’s interview ‘Polemics, Politics and Problematizations’ (1984: 388-389) to the definition that problematization is ‘the process in which actors (academics, politicians, journalists, NGOs, lawyers, or others) analyze a situation, define it as a problem, expand it by attaching other issues, and finally suggest a solution (Schrover 2013: 125-126).
İşleyen argued, inspired by the work of Dean, that the second aspect of the analytics of government is the ‘technical aspect of government’, which is about ‘a set of power technologies, routine techniques, daily instruments, strategic tools and tangible means of imaging, calculating and executing governmentality’ (İşleyen 2015: 677). In his book, Dean outlines his ideas about the technical aspect of government through a set of questions that can be asked if we want to study this phenomena: ‘By what means, mechanisms, procedures, instruments, tactics, techniques, technologies and vocabularies is authority constituted and rule accomplished?’ (Dean 2008: 31). The third aspect that İşleyen distinguished ‘concerns ‘the formation of subjects, selves, persons, actors and agents’ (Dean, 2008: 32) by means of defining tasks and subject positions and the constitution of subjects through technologies that invest in, empower and link individuals at the national, local and transnational levels according to particular government perceptions and aspirations’ (İşleyen 2015: 677). For this thesis, the transnational level is not relevant. Dean argues in his book that the forms o f subjectivity that are promoted through the regime of government are not determining; he states that regimes of government ‘elicit, promote, facilitate, foster and attribute various capacities, qualities and statuses to particular agents. They are successful to the extent that these agents come to experience themselves through such capacities […], qualities […] and
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statuses’ (Dean 2008: 32).
In his book, Dean also discusses a fourth dimension which İşleyen does not discuss in her article. Dean coined this dimension the episteme of government. He conceptualized the episteme of government as the forms of knowledge that arise from and inform the activity of governing (Dean 2008: 31; Dean 1995: 570). A good way to study the particular episteme of government is by raising questions such as: ‘What forms of thought, knowledge, expertise, strategies, means of calculation, or rationality are employed in practices of governing? How does thought seek to transform these practices? How do these practices of governing give rise to specific forms of truth? How does thought seek to render particular issues, domains and problems governable?’ (Dean 2008: 31).
For this thesis, one particular form of governmentality needs more attention, and that is neoliberal governmentality. This particular form of governmentality is introduced by Foucault in his lectures called The Birth of Biopolitics in 1979 (2013) and later extensively discussed in the works of (amongst others) Lemke (2001), İşleyen (2015), Miller and Rose (2008) and Wendy Brown (2015). Therefore, I outline only two aspects of neoliberal governmentality: the market as the ordering principle of relations and the homo oeconomicus as the subject of governing. Foucault argues in The Birth of Biopolitics that one of the essential characteristics of Chicago School neoliberalism is their use of economic analytical schemes and criteria for economic decision making on every aspect of human life (Foucault 2013: 317; Lemke 2001: 197). As İşleyen describes it in her article: ‘The market principles of ‘competition, initiative, risk-taking and prudence’ increasingly regulate how individuals view themselves, their relationships with others and their position in relation to the economy and the state’ (İşleyen 2015: 676).
The second characteristic of neoliberal governmentality is the subjectification of the individual as homo oeconomicus. Following on the earlier quote, İşleyen states that ‘the enterprise society is one that is populated by ‘self-regulating’ and ‘enterprising’ individuals who make use of their individual qualities and abilities, benefit from resources offered to them, make cost–benefit calculations in their decisions, and take individual responsibility for their own failures and actions’ (İşleyen 2015: 676). Central to a neoliberal governmentality is the promotion of ideas such as competition and self-management to every aspect of human life (İşleyen 2015: 684).
As outlined above, the concept of governmentality offers the best tools to study practice of government. I showed how Foucault’s ideas on governmentality developed and how Dean and İşleyen constructed a clear and comprehensible analytical framework of it.
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İşleyen’s understanding of neoliberal governmentality is important, because these specific techniques of governance will come back in the empirical analysis.
3.3 Schinkel’s understanding of society
The sociologist Willem Schinkel discusses in several of his works the concept society (amongst others 2008a; 2014; 2017). Although he makes clear that he is inspired by the works of Michel Foucault, he developed new insights that are useful to complement Foucauldian understanding of society. He uses insights from (amongst others) the French philosophers Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze and the German sociologist Nikolas Luhmann. I outline some of his contributions to the debate and try to combine the insights from Schinkel’s understanding and the broader Foucauldian framework that I outlined above.
Schinkel argues that there are two fundamental pillars for sociology. The first one is that sociologist study order, and, second, that sociologists want to thinks about order within the framework of a unity called society (Schinkel 2008a: 42). These assumptions lead to several paradoxes on the thinking about society. The first paradox is ‘a society can be united but not ordered, but that can also be ordered yet not united’ (Schinkel 2008a: 123; Schinkel 2017: 61). As Schinkel argues: ‘The first productive paradox of society is thus productive in the sense that, even when order is missing, “society” is observable and at hand, open for ordering proposals. And, on the other hand, even when an order exists but unity and clear-cut (cultural, economic) unity is missing, a “society” is at hand, open for unifying proposals’ (Schinkel 2017: 61). This means that it is possible to think about a societal order in a situation in which the order is absent, because of the fact that the societal order is bounded through the concept of society (Schinkel 2008a: 124). The contrary is also possible: we can speak about society as a unitary object, because we can measure the deviation of parts of this order (Schinkel 2008a: 124).
The second productive paradox is the fact that a society can be itself through it not being yet (Schinkel 2008a: 124).3 The idea behind the second paradox is the fact that, on the one hand, society is being seen as a description of a social order, while, on the other hand, society is also used as a normative standpoint on how a social order in unity should look like (Schinkel 2008a: 124). Or as Schinkel himself formulates it: ‘This second productive paradox of society entails the idea that society is itself by not yet being itself. That is to say that a temporalization takes place, which allows for the assumption of an order whose unity will be
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realized in the future, or of a unity to be ordered in the future. This temporalization, albeit in the form of a paradox separating a factual from an ideal and counterfactual society, in effect deparadoxizes the first productive paradox of society. That is to say that the doubling of reality is rendered productive only when the two doubles can be temporalized and do not need to be confronted with simultaneously’ (Schinkel 2017: 62).
The most important contribution of Schinkel to the debates in sociology is that he shows what are the underlying assumptions and structures of thinking about society. To paraphrase the title of the work of Benedict Anderson, Schinkel argues that society is a ‘social imagination’ (Schinkel 2018: 8). This doesn’t mean that societies don’t exist, but that speaking about it, or researching it, is a performative act (Butler 1990). Schinkel argues that society only exist ‘through an active work of difference, of separating a supposed ‘inside’ from an ‘outside, of circumscribing – by means of a work of power-knowledge – who and what is an is not ‘part of society’’ (Schinkel 2018: 9). In other works Schinkel conceptualized this active work of difference as diagrammar, an ‘a grammar of separation, which structures an academic discourse that visualizes the realm of society as separate from a space outside society’ (Schinkel 2013: 1155).
It is also important to see the link between the work of Schinkel about society on the one hand and the Foucauldian discussion of security on the other hand. This link can be best illustrated through a quotation of the opening sentence of the book The Securitization of Society, written by the criminologist Marc Schuilenburg: ‘Security is an ordering concept’ (Schuilenburg 2015: 9). The creation and ordering of society is governed through a discourse of security and, therefore, the study of the basic assumptions underlying sociology and the study of security from a Foucauldian viewpoint can’t be separated.
Schinkel’s ideas about the active creating of difference are also applicable to the discourse of the active and passive citizen or the active and passive member of society. In his article ‘The Virtualization of Citizenship’, Schinkel argues that in contemporary integration discourse there is a differentiation between active and passive citizens (Schinkel 2010: 273). Where citizenship was before only a juridical status, through the moralization of citizenship it becomes an instrument to discipline subjects to behave in line with a certain norm which do not have to be formalized in law (Schinkel 2010: 278). In line with these arguments on integration discourse, this is also applicable to the discourse on active and passive membership of society. Ido de Haan argues that from 2012, there is a hegemonic discourse about the participation society with an emphasis on active membership of society (De Haan 2014). This discourse is an example of neoliberal governmentality, as outlined above. The
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discourse on participation society, in which a differentiation is being made between active and passive members of society, must be seen as a performative act through which different subject are created. The effect of this discourse is that there is the subject of the active member of society who is normalized, and there is the subject of the passive member, who is the abnormal, the pathologic, the individual who must be disciplined through techniques of governing to become a ‘normal’ member of society.
Schinkel’s ideas about the performative construction of society are important for several reasons. First, it helps us to see how society as an object is constructed. Society is not something that independently from its observers exist, but an object that is actively produced. Second, it points us to the fact that society is a diagrammatic discourse. It creates an object or subject, but at the same time also an object or subject that is excluded. We will see this diagrammatic discourse come back in the Wijkprofiel on membership of society.
