Glenn Mackin

ABSTRACT

This article examines the Community Action Programs (CAPs) of the 1960s to explore the generation of democratic subjectivity. Barbara Cruikshank’s Foucault-inspired critique of the CAPs focuses attention on how they operated as modes of governance. These investigations enrich our understanding of the CAPs, but they also miss important aspects of their history. They miss the practices by which actors reconfigure what Jacques Rancière calls the “partition of the sensible” on which the programs were based. Focusing on such moments allows us to develop a different conception of the democratic subject than both the would-be promoters of democracy and the scholars of governmentality utilize: the democratic subject is neither disciplined nor resistant, but rather appears in activities that throw existing subject-positions and the existing order of sense into flux. It then becomes possible to identify moments of democratic emancipation within the workings of subject-forming powers.

From: New Political Science 2020 42 (1)

Editor: Wang Yi