CITIZENSHIP AS METAPHOR
Jernej PIKALO'
COBISS: 1.01
ABSTRACT
Citizenship as Metaphor
The aim of the paper is to analyse metaphors used in imagining forms of citizenship. It moves away from the conventional formula of researching citizens as metaphors in various contexts and introduces a new research perspective: relations between citizens as metaphors. It begins by outlining five major theoretical and methodological considerations relevant to a study of metaphors. The second part of the paper deals with complexities of change in citizenship concepts through metaphors from organic to body politic, mechanistic and multidivisional (regional, global, social, sexual, etc) in the era of globalisation. KEY WORDS: citizenship, metaphors, changes in citizenship, era of globalisation.
IZVLEČEK
Državljanstvo kot metafora
Članek analizira uporabo metafor pri zamišljanju različnih oblik državljanstva. Konvencionalni način preučevanja metafor državljana in državljanstva v različnih kontekstih zamenja z novim raziskovalnim pogledom: odnosi državljana kot metafore. V prvem delu članek očrta pet teoretskih in metodoloških za študij metafor relevantnih opažanj. V drugem delu pa prikazuje kompleksnost sprememb v metaforičnih konceptualizacijah državljanstva v dobi globalizacije, od organskih do telesnih, mehanicističnih, večnivojskih (regionalnih, globalnih, družbenih, seksualnih itn.).
KLJUČNE BESEDE: državljanstvo, metafore, spremembe pri državljanstvu, doba globalizacije
INTRODUCTION
Throughout history, metaphors have played an important role in the political imagination. They have been used in various contexts to generate perceptions and images of politics that have necessarily changed as conceptions in other domains (science, nature, medicine, mechanics, etc.) have changed. Politics has usually been viewed as being on the receiving end of the relationship, borrowing imagery and vocabulary from other domains.
This paper has the particular task of looking into the specific role of citizenship metaphors and their trajectories of change. It begins by outlining five major theoretical considerations relevant to the study
I Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Social Sciences, Kardeljeva pl. 5, SI-1000 Ljubljana, jernej.pikalo@fdv.uni-lj.si. The findings of this paper are in part the result of the US-Slovenian bilateral research project Communities at Crossroads financed by the Slovenian Research Agency.
of metaphors. It shows that in the last two decades the study of political metaphors has moved from analysis of the ornamental functions of metaphors to a constructivist view of metaphors as ontologi-cally creative. The second part of the paper deals with complexities of change in citizenship concepts through metaphors from organic to body politic, mechanistic and multidivisional (regional, global, social, sexual, etc) in the era of globalisation.
The paper shows the trajectories of the development of citizenship through the perspective of metaphor. This may be a rather unconventional way of approaching the topic, but we believe that in this way we can add a new perspective. We would like to change the conventional formula of researching citizenship metaphors and move away from researching citizens as metaphors in various contexts, and introduce a new perspective: relations between citizens as metaphors. It is the relations the citizens are subjected to or relations that they (re)produce that define the role of the citizen. Various metaphors have been used throughout history to describe/create the relations that form the concept of citizen and citizenship. In this paper we therefore present a historical analysis of citizen relations as they have emerged in ontologically creative metaphors over time.
CITIZENSHIP METAPHORS: FIVE ISSUES
One: Is metaphor just a literary device?
Metaphors have a long history in politics. One of the most persistent questions about the nature and role of political metaphors has been the distinction between the metaphorical and literal meanings of political concepts. The 1771 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica states:
Metaphor, in rhetoric, a trope, by which we put a strange word for a proper word, by reason of its resemblance to it; a simile or comparison intended to enforce or illustrate the thing we speak of, without the signs or forms of comparison (quoted in Miller 2003: 3).
A metaphor can be a number of things. It can be just a rhetorical device, a figure of speech, a tool in language, a device of poetic imagination, a deviant linguistic expression, a matter of words rather than thought or action, the primary role for which the depiction of social reality with a word is different from the one usually understood to be literal. Or, as we have come to know it since the linguistic turn in social sciences and its accompanying linguistic-based methodologies, as something 'more' than just ornament of language.
The Greek roots of the word 'metaphor' have very little to do with metaphor as a corrupting device in language. Metaphor, literally meaning 'to carry over', is in the Aristotelian tradition characteristically defined in terms of movement, change with respect to location, mainly movement 'from ... to' (Ricoeur 1981: 17; see also the chapters by Fridolfsson, Honohan, Mottier and Howarth and Griggs in Carver & Pikalo 2008). Aristotle applies the word 'metaphor' to every transposition in terms. Metaphor functions as a kind of borrowing; the borrowed meaning is opposed to the 'proper' meaning, one resorts to metaphors to fill a semantic void, and a borrowed word takes the place of an absent proper word where such a place exists (Ricoeur 1981: 17-18).
In the Aristotelian tradition metaphors do not have an ontologically creative function. They may, however, disturb an already established logical order of language where transposition operates. They may bring upon an already established order a new one, since the transposition operates within this established order. Aristotle's process of epiphora (movement from ... to) rests on a perception of resemblance, established ontologically prior to metaphor itself. Metaphors just add meanings, fill semantic voids, and substitute where necessary, but they do not have a creative (constructive) function. Aristo-
tie's ontological assumption is that language is transparent to reality and that metaphors are operating within this already established order.
The classical perception of metaphor as having merely a substitutive function was challenged by Max Black in his seminal study Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy (1962). According to Black, metaphor does more than just substitute for a literal term (see Zashin and Chapman 1974: 296-7; Ricoeur 1981: 83-90; Maasen 1995: 14-15), when a speaker chooses to replace it with another expression different from a supposed 'normal', 'proper' meaning. Mere substitution introduces no new information and has therefore no cognitive function. Black's 'interaction view' of metaphor, on the other hand, goes beyond a merely decorative function for metaphor. It emphasises cognitive function by stressing the re-organisation and transformation of the original term. Metaphor operates by describing one phenomenon in terms of the other. By this it evokes re-organisation of meanings in both domains and reciprocity of impact.
Metaphor can also have a function of rendering certain views as prominent - by emphasising some details and de-emphasising others. In this it functions almost like a pair of tinted glasses through which a re-organisation of the view of the observed object is viewed. A successful metaphor establishes a privileged perspective on the object and thus becomes normalised - in this, it disappears as metaphor (Maasen 1995: 14-15).
With regard to citizenship metaphors it is important to note that different metaphors used in the conceptual history of citizenship are not just ornaments of language, rhetorical devices or, said very plainly, nicer words replacing others, but that they serve ontologically creative purposes. They construct our understanding of citizenship, they are tools for discursive constructions and consequently our understanding of political reality, political relations and processes. They are vehicles for the production of subjects and objects that participate in what are generally regarded as (global) political processes. As discursive constructions change, so do conceptualisations of citizenship. Trajectories of metaphorical change are therefore good indicators of the changes in understanding and constructing of citizenship.
Two: The ontologically creative function of metaphors
Metaphors can therefore perform functions other than just corrupting language. They are also creative of the world and reality. This does not, however, mean that there must be an unequivocal/linear/singular relation between the language and the world. Social theory and twentieth-century social science methodologies have offered numerous insights and solutions to this question; most post-positivist theories reject the notion that writing and thinking are transparent activities performed by historically and socially 'cleansed' or 'disembedded' subjects. Non-empirical and non-positivist political studies rely heavily on the narrative form of explanation, thereby rejecting the view of language as literal, static and intersubjectively and transhistorically uniform. They argue instead for a multifaceted view of language that includes paradoxes and antitheses as constructive elements of the world-creating process (see Zashin and Chapman 1974: 294).
The way we organise our perceptions of the world (and the world itself) is very much dependent upon the ways through which we form knowledge about the world. These may be called traditions, cultures, discourses, epistemic realities governing the production of knowledge, and conceptualisations through power relations, the bottom line being that knowledge is dependent upon the structures governing its production. Metaphors are therefore dependent upon the same structures, functioning in this respect as myths, rendering the unintelligible intelligible and the non-empirical empirical. It is through metaphor that the abstract field of 'the political' becomes empirical as a matter of reality, and thus a world that political science can purport to explain.
Thought processes that create the world are irreducibly metaphorical in their structure; the world is rendered intelligible through metaphor (cf. Lakoff 1980/2003). Citizenship metaphors, inter alia, are
manifestations of these thought processes through which the political world and its processes become intelligible. In this way, metaphors inscribe meanings and produce political realities that stretch the limits of our imaginations.
This poetic function of metaphor presents a potential for construction and creativity in politics. It is closely connected with the transference of meanings from one domain to the other. As such it is a challenge and a potential for the transformation of meanings across any number of domains. One result of these processes may be that grids of intelligibility themselves become unstable, requiring a re-articulation of knowledge and identity not just epistemically but also ontologically.
Three: Contextualisation of metaphors
Isolated statements or utterances are the usual units of metaphorical analysis for cognitive linguists. This is also the path that most analysts of political metaphors have taken. That approach is somewhat problematic for citizenship metaphors, because it fails to take into account the wider contexts of statements and discourses and the circumstances of their production (see the chapter by Mottier in Carver & Pikalo 2008). Social and political contexts play a major role in how citizenship metaphors are defined, how they function and what their meanings are. The contingency of historical contexts should be taken into account in order to situate metaphors within political, social, and scientific relations of power and resistance against those relations of power. Metaphors develop their meanings in this interplay of texts and contexts, albeit not in a linear causality between the two.
The principal weakness of analyzing metaphors in a text-context hermeneutical fashion is in the neglecting of power relations and the institutions that structure that context. The aim of the research of citizenship metaphors (and in social sciences in general) should be to locate metaphors in wider contexts, beyond mere statements and their meanings. We should be interested in discursive power relations/epistemic realities that permit/forbid the emergence of citizenship metaphors. The analysis should question the mode of existence of citizenship metaphors - what it means for them to have appeared when, where and by whom they did - and why they and not others.
The research endeavour should be to find out what were/are the ways and efforts to stabilize, fix and possibly to materialize the dominant meaning of citizenship through metaphors. To see how knowledge of citizenship (concepts, theories, etc.) were structured and changed via metaphor. How knowledge was ordered and othered through metaphors. Grids of intelligibility in a discourse (e.g. political discourse) are inherently unstable, requiring constant and repeated re-articulation of knowledge and identity. Intelligibility through a 'regime of truth' is not done once and for all; historical transformations and discontinuities are regular. Historical contexts are contingent. Authorized speakers are required to produce and reproduce knowledge in order to maintain it. This requires them to be situated in wider epistemic realities. In short, the analysis of citizenship metaphors should be about what metaphors do to the systems of representation and meaning and how they do it.
Metaphors are not ontologically prior to historical contexts or discourses as 'regimes of truth'. They are not outside of the historical contexts. They emerge in the very field of the battle for meaning and play their roles. They signify and materialize the concept of citizenship, they order and reorder it.
Four: The role of audience(s)
The role of the reader/audience in the process of meaning production is largely neglected in construc-tivist thought. Readers' tacit knowledge structures and cognitive schemata are important ontological elements in materializing the world. Double hermeneutics, whereby a researcher (i.e. reader) also ques-
tions and takes into account his/her cognitive structures and tacit contextual knowledge during an analysis of someone else's text, is essential in researching metaphors.
Which metaphors will come into play and become dominant is dependent not just upon the discursive background, but also by the non-discursive one. Foucault (1972: 157) has described the non-discursive background in terms of 'an institutional field, a set of events, practices and political decisions, a sequence of economic processes that involve demographic fluctuations, techniques of public assistance, manpower needs, different levels of unemployment, etc.' Discourses in themselves cannot force. They acquire force through their influence on human actors in the form of research agendas, funding opportunities, focusing research energies, political issues, emerging social questions, trends etc. The success of metaphors as cognitive schemata that are organizing the world is dependent upon discursive and non-discursive factors. Contextual research of metaphors should take both into account.
The non-discursive background is central for determining the meaning of metaphors for the audience/reader. Ethos, pathos and logos are the classic Aristotelian rhetorical components of an argument, but far from enough to determine the creative/constructive function of a metaphor. Meaning is not given by ethos, logos and pathos, but is rather negotiated in the process of meaning creation between interlocutor and audience. By employing a political metaphor one does not just convince the audience/ reader about the appropriateness of seeing an issue in certain way, but is also structuring it. So the process of meaning determination and meaning creation is mutually productive.
Five: Metaphor effectiveness
Not all metaphors are equally effective. The effectiveness depends on shared social conventions, the authority granted to those that use them and on shared dominant background knowledge. The wrong metaphor at the wrong time has no effect. Also, not all metaphors have the same productive effects.
In summary, the lessons of new insights into metaphor theory and methodology for citizenship metaphors and migrations are the following: first, metaphors with which we describe citizens and citizenship (and consequently migrants) are not just other (different) words that denote the same content. With the change of metaphor a conceptual change also occurs. In this way, citizenship and citizens are constructed differently, sometimes anew, with features, obligations, rights and relationships that are different than in their previous conceptions. Secondly, these changes do not occur spontaneously; they are products of political struggles and constructed within the text-context relationship. Thirdly, different (new) constructions of citizens and citizenship change our perception of political reality, political relations and processes, in other words, the world. This is additionally important for the perception of migrants and migrations as social and political processes.
CITIZENSHIP AS METAPHOR: FROM BODY POLITIC TO ATOMS TO NETWORKS
The conventional way of analysing citizenship metaphors would be to look for citizenship metaphors that have emerged over time and analyse them in their contexts. This paper, though, builds on a rather different theoretical perspective about citizens and citizenship. It holds that individuals are socially, politically and culturally embedded and does not treat them as lone players outside of their contexts. Every individual (and social concept, for that matter) is socially and politically embedded and thus dependent and reliant upon his/her social structures (Roncevic and Makarovic 2010). We would like to change the conventional formula of researching citizenship metaphors and move away from researching citizens as metaphors in various contexts and introduce a new perspective: citizens as such are not metaphors,
their relations are. It is the relations the citizens are subjected to or relations that they (re)produce that define the role of the citizen. Different metaphors are used in history to describe/create relations that make the concept of citizen and citizenship. In this paper we therefore present a historical analysis of citizen relations as they have emerged in ontologically creative metaphors over time.
We will show that citizenship is a metaphor for the relationship between the citizen and the state, that in recent times this is far from an exclusive relationship between citizens and the state, that relationships have changed over time, and that they have been transformed from organic to legal to nonlinear differential network. From the perspective of the state, Poggi (2003: 39-48) has identified ten aspects of the relationship between states and citizens: citizens as subjects of the state, as taxpayers, as soldiers, as constituents, as sovereigns, as (co)nationals, as private individuals, as political participants, as spectators, and as equals. It is interesting to note that not all aspects have emerged simultaneously, that some still exist (e.g. as tax payers, as political participants, as spectators), while others have to a certain extent been changed (citizens as soldiers, citizens as equals) or forgotten altogether (citizens as constituents in the Hellenic and Roman sense where they were responsible for the city's very existence in the constructivist sense).1
Metaphors of citizenship and citizen are products of their time. The knowledge about citizen and citizenship that they produce, and the production of knowledge about them, are both embedded in the epistemic frame of an epoch. Thinking about citizen and citizenship is informed and structured by metaphors figuring in various discourses. This implies that our thinking about citizenship is possible only within the boundaries of our imagery of citizenship. In this respect, metaphors, with their carry over or transfer function, enable the transferring of meanings about citizenship and citizen from other discourses, thus enabling metaphor to perform its poetic function, where creativity and innovation in the conception can take place.
The origins of the metaphor of the organic relationship between citizens and the state can be found in ancient Greece. Especially in the age of Pericles the Athenian polis achieved an extraordinary amount of political unity and developed an organic analogy to express this unity (Hale 1971: 18). The Athenian citizen was only fulfilling himself as a member of the polis, as someone who takes part in the public affairs of the polis. This basically meant that discussion, debate, deliberating, election, holding office - participating actively in public life in general - meant being a citizen. The relations that a citizen had in the (political) community were a defining characteristic of his status. Women, children, foreigners and migrants were all prohibited from having those public relations.
The first examples of the human body as a metaphor to express the relationship of the unity between the state and citizens can be traced back to Areopagiticus (355 BC) of Isocrates: "For the soul of a state is nothing else than its polity, having as much power over it as it does the mind over body; for it is this which deliberates upon all questions, seeking to preserve what is good and to ward off what is disastrous; and it is this which of necessity assimilates to its own nature the laws, the public orators and the private citizens; and all the members of the state must fare well or ill according to the kind of polity under which they live" (quoted in Hale 1971: 19). Isocrates emphasized the participation of all citizens in the political life of the polis and the dependence of their welfare on the proper functioning of the constitution of the city.
1 The perspective of citizens as constituents might be gone in the Roman and Hellenic sense, but the idea of the population being responsible for the existence of the city has carried on. The city in the sense of a constructed reality of formerly discrete and powerless individuals that constitute themselves first into juridically distinct, politically autonomous and militarily effective entity is present in the medieval West. This is later transformed into a population that does state-building and 'owns' a share of it as citizens. This aspect of the state-citizenship relationship is important for informing understanding of the status of migrants - those that come from other places and do not possess ownership or authorship of the political entity.
Plato in The Republic speaks of the 'healthy state' and the 'fevered state' (Book III),2 while Aristotle (1996: 13) in Politics (Book I, 1253a, I, 4-5) says that "... it is evident that the state is a creature of nature and that man is by nature a political animal". This reaffirms two basic principles of the idea of the body politic: that society is a natural, not man-made creation, and that man's highest nature is to have a relationship with society, to be part of society, not an individual (Hale 1971: 21).
The idea of the body politic is made possible by Greek science, whose view of nature was generally accepted in Western thought until the Renaissance. In this view, the universe was created according to the most perfect model, a Living Creature. The life and the psychological order that an individual possesses is identical with the life and order of the polis and the Cosmos (Hale 1971: 23). It is important to note that ancient Greek, like other modern languages (including English), has two important meanings for the word 'nature' (physis). In one sense it is the sum of all created things, and in the other it is also a defining principle of a thing, as in the quality of a thing. This has an important consequence for our discussion about the idea of body politic as metaphor for citizenship. The state in this respect is metaphorically thought of as a human organism: each member of the state (i.e. citizen) has an important function which is natural and appropriate for both the part (i.e. citizen) and the whole of which it is a part (i.e. the state) (Hale 1971: 23). Aristotle (quoted in Hale 1971: 23) even says that the constitution of an animal resembles that of well-governed city-state. According to him there is no need for a special ruler with arbitrary powers in an ordered city, as there is no need for soul in each part of the animal body, because nature has taken care of the functioning of the body, so that it performs functions in a natural way (Hale 1971: 23-24).
In Hellenic and Roman times the close ties (including close family ties) of the polis were replaced by other modes of relationship for inclusion into society. Political morality based on membership of a polis as a natural relation of the whole and its parts no longer seemed an appropriate mode of inclusion for larger territories and empires. Political thinking went along with new political conditions, and Roman Stoics conceived political morality in terms of one's relations with other individuals and not with a polis. Seneca writes in the 95th Epistle to Lucilius (quoted in Hale 1971: 26; see also Seneca 1995): "I can lay down for mankind a rule... for our duties in human relationships: all that you behold, that which comprises both god and man, is one - we are all parts of one great body. Nature produced us related to one another, since she created us from the same source and to the same end." Despite the shift in the source of political morality, the metaphor of body politic modelled according to the natural body is preserved.
The metaphor of organic society from the later Stoics was passed into the early Christian tradition. St. Paul in his First Epistle to the Corinthians makes a number of points which are similar to that of the Stoics. He "assumes of hierarchical order, established by God (or nature), of differentiated parts, all of which are necessary to the body and which ought not, therefore, to regard themselves as either independent of the body or as superior to other members" (Hale 1971: 29). This organic metaphor is frequently repeated as an admonition against disagreement and dissention among the churches.
St. Augustine in The City of God further developed the organic metaphor and introduced the idea of a mystical body (corpus mysticum) (Hale 1971: 31-32; see also Gierke 1913: 17-19). This body has, in contrast to the Athenian polis or the universe of the Stoics, no real meaning in this world, but is rather community of the saved. The story is about the spiritual body, Christ being the head and the members of the Church the body. The unity of the body and the head is achieved through sacraments, for those who have eaten the body of Christ in the form of eucharisteia are incorporated in his body. The process of transubstantiation is based on the metaphorical imagining of inclusion into the community of the saved by eucharisteia.
The debate about the mystical and real body of Christ continued throughout the Middle Ages (cf. Kantorowitz 1997). In the early Christian era both bodies were being kept apart, but in about the eighth
2 Plato in the Republic also speaks of a metaphor of "fashioning" a happy city and he makes comparison to painting a statute (Zashin, Chapman 1974: 303).
century the concepts began to fuse. The body of the Church also ceases to be just a community of believers, but becomes a supreme ecclesiastical hierarchy whose head is the Pope. Papal supremacy is in ever stronger conflict with emerging national monarchies, whose response to this was the appropriation of the language of political theology and use of the body politic metaphor influenced by the recent rediscovery of Aristotle's Politics. Hale (1971: 38-39) outlines three possible responses to papal supremacy: either rulers acknowledged papal claims and identified the king or emperor as a heart and stressed the importance of this organ to the head, or they could define a distinct corpus naturale (secular body) with its own head, thus making things schizophrenic, or, most radically, they could maintain that only Christ, and not the Pope, is the head.
In 1543 Nicholas Copernicus published De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, in which he presented a heliocentric model of the world and its context. That work challenged the age-old view that the universe worked quite differently, a geo-centric model that exaggerated the importance of the Earth, and, by extension, the importance of human beings. The realisation that we, our planet, and indeed our solar system (and even our galaxy) are quite ordinary in heavenly terms, since there are very likely myriads of planetary systems, provided a sobering and unsettling revision. All the reassurances of the cosmology of the Middle Ages were gone, and a new view of the world, less secure and comfortable, came into being.
Sixteenth and seventeenth century England experienced political transformations that were directly linked to the new reference worlds of the Copernican revolution. No longer was the harmony of various parts the most powerful metaphor; the decay of the old cosmology and theology opening up a space for a new vision of a man.
The body-in-motion upon which he [Hobbes] builds his system is a symbolic figure. It represents the individual human being, but in a very special way: no longer he is a member of the body politic; no longer does he have a place in a hierarchical system of deference and authority; no longer do his movements conduce to universal harmony. Instead, the individual is alone, separated from his fellows, without a master or a secure social place; his movements, determined by no one but himself, clash with the movements of the other, identical individuals; he acts out chaos (Walzer 1967: 201).
As the medieval conception of the body politic as a living organism was coming to its end, new metaphors were being introduced. Locke insisted upon a new metaphor for society, a body politic as a joint stock company instead of living organism, where free individuals have their stakes (Hale 1971: 13).
Disharmonies in the body politic became easier to explore, and a new individualism was coming of age. Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and their fellow thinkers were presented with the challenge of forging new political theories and doctrines based on these new scientific discoveries. In other words, the Copernican revolution provided a new worldview, a new epistemic reality according to which knowledge about the world was being re-created. It provided new principles, and new metaphors to orient and create political knowledge; it would later evolve into individualism and eventually liberalism (cf. Wolin 1960: 282; Walzer 1967: 203).
The Copernican revolution and subsequent new vision(s) of social and political relations brought a major change in the understanding of the relations between citizens. Metaphor changed radically. The concept of a social contract was introduced to capture the new metaphorical reality: no longer was the defining characteristic of the citizen its relations with the body as the whole, it was replaced by the relationship of legal obligation. Citizens were no longer defined by their relations and actions in the public sphere (ancient Greece), nor by their relations to the real or mystical body of the king (Middle Ages), or moral relations to each other defined by the religion in the form of the community of the saved. The new citizen was freed from organic and land-ownership relations: he was free, no longer attached either to his feudal lord or the king. His relations had to be (metaphorically) imagined anew.
The Newtonian world of mechanical motion became the new reference-world for new political thought, a new source of metaphors, analogies, and images. The metaphor of mechanical motion, clockwork mechanism, was appropriate for the time when people were - due to political and social transformations - literally set in motion. The metaphor of a clockwork mechanism not also described, but also prescribed, not just of man but also of the state. Hobbes took the metaphor very seriously and applied it to various political concepts. Nowhere is this better expressed than in the opening chapter of Leviathan:
For what is the Heart, but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the Joynts, but so many Wheeles,
giving motion to the whole Body, such as was intended by the Artificer? (Hobbes 1651/1996: 9).
In physics the system is called mechanical according to Newton "if and only if its basic entities are particles that move in orbit" (Landau 1961: 337). It is a closed system, consisting of discrete bodies, each possessing a specific set of properties (such as mass and position) that act over space and time in accordance with fixed law. The motion of the body is determined by the action of external forces and these actions forces arise from the action of other bodies in the system. In such system there is only lawful behaviour: from a definite configuration of particles there will always follow the same results; there are no alternatives and there is nothing any part of the system can do about it. (Landau 1961: 337) It is a completely predictable structure.
Accordingly, society came to be thought in terms of mechanics. Social processes were seen as determined processes, the motion (behaviour) of bodies (human beings) was preset and controlled according to the laws of nature. (Landau 1961: 338) Natural man, whose properties included natural rights, was directed by natural forces to form societies. A state was no more than a sum of discrete and elemental bodies.
Individuals became sovereign individuals, free and equal, with rights and duties in comparison with their previous societal position as subjects in estates. Because they were endowed with various absolute and unalienable rights and natures stemming from the gained importance of natural law and social contract theory, they were metaphorically thought of as of having the same weight, volume and value. They were imagined as atoms. As atoms that freely form bonds with other atoms. Atoms that have separate identities from each other, whose behaviour is governed by rights and duties. It is important to note the ontologically constructivist consequence of this new citizenship metaphor: because all individuals were envisioned as endowed with the same rights, this meant that they formed voluntary and no longer obligatory relationships in a community. Because they were free, brute political or physical force was no longer capable or adequate for holding a community together. The microphysics of power (Foucault 1990) and other mechanisms of forming bonds with loose atoms had to be metaphorically invented.
Out of this metaphorical structuring of citizens, two citizenship concepts emerged: citizenship as universal category and citizenship as historical category. Citizenship as universal category is related to the specific context in which the United States was created. It denotes that citizens as atoms are universally endowed with equal rights at the specific time of the creation of the United States. Citizenship as a historical category is, on the other hand, a European category, where in the famous 1950 formulation of T. H. Marshall, citizen is defined as the inheritor of a series of rights and responsibilities which have emerged over time.3 Marshall's conception of the citizen is, despite his innovation in elevating it from the realm of political rights, still rather passive. The citizen is a recipient of rights through his status as a citizen which does not entail any activity. Passive citizenship is about claims and rights of protection, rarely duties. This is in contrast with Republican virtues of active citizenship where voluntary associations and citizens' public commitment are all important.
3 Marshall's (1950) distinctive contribution to the study of citizenship was to go beyond political rights and to introduce the concept of social rights.
These metaphoric imaginations of citizen relations, including T. H. Marshall's, have one thing in common: they are all imagined against the backdrop of territory or physical space. Moreover, metaphorical imaginations are wholly informed by methodological territorialism (cf. Scholte 2005) whereby territory is methodologically pre-imagined. Thus citizens and their relations are thought of as if their only reference was to the state and not any other association or allegiance going beyond mere state territory. It pretends that the concept of citizen is tied to the physical space and that is the major source of tension in today's globalised world. From the point of metaphors of relations of citizens, this signals a need for a major shift in metaphor to describe and construct new realities.
A territory delimited with borders, rooted in a physical space, is conventionally connected to the dominant concept of the state. The state is metaphorically thought of as a container. There are several strands of thinking about the state as a container: firstly, the state as a power container that is a legitimate source of power. As such, endowed with power, it maintains order and justice in a territory that is physically delimited by borders. The direct ontological consequences of this metaphorical imagining are that the borders of the state are seen as fixed and unchangeable, denying their historical, contextual and relational components. The borders of the state are not, according to this imagining, the results of social constructions and governance technologies. Secondly, the state is imagined as a container (and retainer) of wealth, that on one hand internally maintains good life, and externally tries to maximise its profits. In the era of globalisation, the imagination of wealth in a pile is a major oversimplification, as today's wealth is mainly relational, produced in synergic relations with other states. The role of the state is no longer to maintain wealth as such; it is rather to enable its citizens structural conditions for global social relations that can produce wealth. Thirdly, the state is also seen as a culture container or maintainer, connecting divergent cultural groups into what is conventionally called national culture. The consequence of this metaphorical imagination is that migrants, i.e. those coming from outside the container, are variously thought of and described as arriving in "waves", "rivers" or "flows" at the borders of the container. In some national contexts (e.g. in the Dutch), immigrants are even metaphorically imagined as allochthonous, taking the metaphor from geology and implying that they are not part of the society. As a rock is brought by the stream down the river from its original place (i.e. it is allochthonous), so the immigrants are from somewhere else and can always be pushed or forced back to their country of origin. Despite years of living in a society, they are not seen as part of the relations in a society and thus denied status of a citizen. If citizens are their relations, immigrants are barred from even entering into these relations.
In the world of globalised postnational states, where sovereignty is fragmented, eroded or even past its shelf life (Vodovnik 2011), the old metaphorical imaginations of citizens and citizenship are no longer appropriate. At best, they are causing tensions, and at worst they are destroying people's lives and hampering progress (Banjac 2010). These changes have major implications for the nature of citizenship within national communities, to the extent that the pact between the citizen and the state is undergoing a fundamental transformation and governments can no longer fulfil their share of the bargain. That citizenship in advanced industrial national-states is undergoing an important redefinition in several of its aspects is without question. The concept of moral obligations of citizens towards the body politic of the Roman times and Middle Ages is long gone. The legal obligations of citizens stemming from social contract and natural law might still be there as long as the current state is there, but they are also being eroded by social processes that have been transforming the very ontological existence of the world since the Peace of Westphalia (1648).
Due to globalisation processes, citizen relations are far from being exclusively with the state. The revolution in communication and information technology has brought an unprecedented change in human relations. They are not just faster, more intensive, cheaper and more frequent than ever before, above all they have become global in scale and scope. Time and space compression has occurred. Physical distances and physical obstacles (i.e. borders) are unimportant. If the state as a container had been a defining element of internal and external social relations of citizens since the 18th century, this has
radically changed. Today's citizens form dense networks of social relations across borders. Borders are rarely only separating, but are also connecting. The external borders of the state have long become internalised and mobile (Pikalo, Banjac and Ilc 2011). The internal/external divide has been radically re-articulated.4 Out of all of these processes new forms of citizenship have emerged: environmental citizenship, translocal citizenship (Vodovnik 2011), global instrumental citizenship, multiple, overlapping citizenships, transnationalism as a citizenship, etc.
All these new citizenship forms have one thing in common: they are a radical and important change because they replace the old metaphorical imagination of citizen relations as imaginarily connected to the state's physical territory by citizen relations as a network that, irrespective of the physical territory, variably stretches across the globe. The old metaphors of citizen relations have been replaced by a new metaphor of a network that best describes and prescribes new (global) societal relations. In the world of global optimism and renewed hope in human (cosmopolitan) possibility of peaceful coexistence after 1989, the network metaphor was the most effective with respect to the new understandings of the audiences.
The network metaphor served two purposes: to describe and prescribe a new imagination for societal relations in the 21st century, but also to serve the ideological purpose of suggesting that all people can find their place in the network and are therefore in this respect equal. The network was supposed to be imagined as a democratic network, metaphorically imagined with respect to computer networks such as the internet. As such, the metaphor obscured the issue of social power relations. To reflect the issue of uneven and unequal social relations, a rather different metaphor of citizenship relations must be employed: a metaphor of differential networks that reflect different power positions and relationships within networks.
New citizen relations are not condensed into one single network. It is much more fruitful to think of citizen relations intertwined in numerous, overlapping networks of which the citizen is a part. Out of this new metaphorical fashioning of the relations of citizen other questions appear: the question of overlapping communities which are not territorially exclusive, but rather territorially promiscuous; overlapping global rights and duties - is it morally desirable or morally required to fulfil global obligations? In a global world with relations of citizens overlapping in deterritorialised networks, is the concept of homeland what it used to be?
METAPHORS: THE PROSE OF THE WORLD
Historians often suggest that an era is best known by the metaphors used. In this paper we have briefly sketched the relationship between citizenship conceptions and metaphors employed for describing and prescribing citizen relations in various historical contexts. Our research has been limited to some historical shifts, when changes occurred that are still having a decisive impact on the way we perceive 'citizen' and 'citizenship'. The citizenship metaphors researched have primarily been employed not as language forms, but as cognitive schemata. They structure our systems of representation and meaning. They are often 'dead' metaphors, though far from 'dead' in terms of their effectiveness and productivity.
We have shown that by moving away from the conventional formula of researching citizenship metaphors and by introducing a new perspective of metaphors of relations we can gain a new perspective on citizenship concepts. The ontological creativity of metaphors for political reality has shown the centrality of the concept of citizenship to the understanding of political development throughout history. We have researched how metaphors of citizenship allow political language to free itself from the
4 For the impact of this re-articulation on the level of European identity formation, see Toplak, Velikonja, Pikalo, Stankovic, Sabec, Komel (2011).
function of direct description and to set up a contingent relationship between words and reality. With this, imagination is freed from the constraints of objectivism, and new creations of the world can occur. The relationship between metaphors and objects is then a reciprocal construction in the disciplinary division of labour of the modern social sciences. Or to say it with metaphor, metaphors are actually the prose of the world we create in their image.
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SUMMARY
CITIZENSHIP AS METAPHOR
Jernej PIKALO
Namen članka je analizirati metafore, uporabljene pri predstavah o oblikah državljanstva. Odmika se od konvencionalne formule raziskovanja državljanov kot prispodob v različnih kontekstih in uvaja novo raziskovalno perspektivo: razmerja med državljani kot metaforami. Uvodoma oriše pet glavnih teoretičnih in metodoloških podmen, ki se navezujejo na preučevanje metafor. Drugi del članka obravnava kompleksnosti sprememb v konceptih o državljanstvu skozi metafore, ki v dobi globalizacije obsegajo vse od organskih do političnih, mehanističnih in večdimenzionalnih (regionalnih, globalnih, družbenih, seksualnih itd.).