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Who is the subject of neoliberal rights?

Governmentality, subjectification and
the letter of the law
a
Anna Selmeczi
a
South African Research Chair Initiative: Social Change,
University of Fort Hare, East London, South Africa
Published online: 02 Jul 2015.

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To cite this article: Anna Selmeczi (2015) Who is the subject of neoliberal rights? Governmentality,
subjectification and the letter of the law, Third World Quarterly, 36:6, 1076-1091, DOI:
10.1080/01436597.2015.1047194

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 Third World Quarterly, 2015
Vol. 36, No. 6, 10761091, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2015.1047194

Who is the subject of neoliberal

rights? Governmentality,
subjectication and the letter of the
law
Anna Selmeczi*
South African Research Chair Initiative: Social Change, University of Fort Hare, East London, South Africa
Downloaded by [Anna Selmeczi] at 07:27 04 July 2015

Motivated by the litigious politics of the South African shack-dwellers

movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo, this paper enquires into the knowl-
edge dynamics implied by the governmentality literatures take on the
(neo)liberal deployment of (human) rights. It suggests that by implic-
itly constructing the freedom of codied rights as illusionary and
opposed to the reality of neoliberal rationalities of government, this
scholarship posits a cognitive hierarchy between agents of government
and the governed, and thus reproduces the power dynamics that it
seeks to criticise. Interweaving a presentation of Abahlalis self-
articulation as knowledgeable and rightful subjects with Jacques
Rancires notion of literariness, the paper accounts for codied
rights potential to enable the disruption of such dynamics, and traces
the governmentality literatures suspicion towards this potential back to
its textual methodology.
Keywords: Abahlali baseMjondolo; governmentality; literariness;
Rancire; subjectication

Introduction
One of the major contributions of the scholarship mobilising Michel Foucaults
notions of biopolitics and governmentality over the past three decades has been
a reinterpretation of the basic discourses and institutions of contemporary liberal
democracies as the means of a predominantly productive mode of power, one
that governs populations and their individual members through constructing
them as free and self-governing subjects. Drawing mainly on Foucaults Collge
de France lecture series,1 sociologists, anthropologists and students of (world)
politics have engaged in analysing how the law and human rights alongside
other technologies allied to (neo)liberal rationalities of rule are being deployed
on societies or particular groups of people so as to congure and secure the

*Email: anna.selmeczi@gmail.com

2015 Southseries Inc., www.thirdworldquarterly.com

 Third World Quarterly 1077

(neo)liberal practice of freedom, thereby producing governable subjects. In a

concurrent research programme that emanates from the Foucauldian conception
of power as coexistent with resistance,2 scholars have pondered how such tech-
nologies of subject formation might be challenged; how regimes of power that
govern people through their freedom might be resisted. Intriguingly, at the inter-
section of these two lines of investigation, a puzzle emerges: if the framework
of the rule of law and the rights of the human and the citizen are being recast
by (neo)liberal techniques and mentalities of rule in order to secure efcient
government, then what are we to make of struggles framed in terms of rights
against this very mode of rule? If freedom is indeed the vehicle of power, then
how could demands for freedom enshrined in rights declarations manifest a
challenge to power?
At one extreme of the conceptual spectrum outlined by theoretical renderings
of biopolitics and governmentality, the previous questions are non-questions, for
freedoms and rights won through modern popular struggles and inscribed into
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national and international legislation serve merely to further the biopolitical

entanglement and exposure of our bare existence to the order of sovereign vio-
lence.3 From a somewhat less pessimistic perspective, whereas resistance can
never get beyond power as the rebellious subject is just as much its product as
those who comply, specic technologies and effects of power can and are being
diverted or sabotaged, albeit within the boundaries of, and according to, the
neoliberal construction of freedom.4 Thus, although with varying implications
for thinking the possibilities of challenging biopolitical technologies of rule,
both Agambens conception of sovereign biopower and the more permissive
accounts of productive governmentality posit the freedom of the rights-bearing
subject as captured by neoliberalism as the contemporary framework of
biopolitics.5
Yet, again, what does this conceptual position entail when reecting on prac-
tices of popular struggles that articulate rights claims? Does it enable the theo-
rization of rights struggles capacity to meaningfully defy contemporary modes
of rule and their governmental techniques? Certainly, as a growing body of
recent literature documents, various acts of citizenship are indeed able to chal-
lenge the divisionary biopolitics of (neo)liberal government.6 Resisting being
muted by governmental technologies that construct them in juxtaposition to
rightful citizens, illegal immigrants, asylum seekers and other groups margina-
lised by states attempts at delimiting the governed collective frequently invent
ways to crack the order of liberal citizenship and appropriate the right to be
heard, remembered and saved from harm.7 Mindful of accounts of such acts as
sensible contestations of contemporary governmentalities, this paper is motivated
by my encounter with Abahlali baseMjondolo, a South African shack-dwellers
movement and by its litigious practices in particular.8 That work sensitised me
to a mode of othering that, perhaps because it manifests more subtle demarca-
tions than those granting or denying the rights of citizenship, remains unchal-
lenged in most takes of the governmentality literature on (human) rights. As I
have discussed elsewhere, at the centre of Abahlalis struggle for a dignied life
in the city is the displacement of a cognitive order that maps onto the spatio-
temporal allocation of lives nurtured or abandoned.9 In this order inhabitants of
urban margins are not supposed to have the capacities to think and enact
 1078 A. Selmeczi

a politics that rejects the lot of invisibility among unbearable and often lethal
living conditions. Indeed, in public discourse shack-dwellers and other margina-
lised groups are constructed as politically illiterate.
It is in light of such constructions of political illiteracy that I inquire below
into the knowledge dynamics implied by the governmentality literatures take on
the (neo)liberal deployment of (human) rights. As the rst section shows, by
implicitly constructing the freedom codied in (human) rights as illusionary and
opposed to the reality of neoliberal rationalities of government, this scholarship
tends to posit, albeit implicitly, the intellectual inferiority of the governed, and
thus reproduces the very dynamics of governmental power that it seeks to criti-
cise. Exposing such dynamics, the second section presents the disruptive politics
of Abahlalis self-articulation as knowledgeable subjects of rights. Via Jacques
Rancires notion of literariness which accounts for codied rights potential
to enable such disruptions I nally return to the governmentality literature
and locate the limits of its imagery of emancipation in its own approach to
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textuality.

Forming the rightful subject of (neo)liberalism: the appeal of freedom

Over the past three decades Foucaults genealogy of modern political reason has
given rise to a thriving literature engaging (neo)liberalism as arts of government
that assemble ways of rendering the object of rule governable and reecting on
the very practice of rule.10 Whereas this approach certainly recognises the sig-
nicance of individual rights and the rule of law within liberalism, driven by
Foucaults renowned claim about the receding role of sovereign power and its
legal means, it posits these as subsumed under liberal governmentality.11 Hence,
rights and liberties are rendered as one among many features of the governed
subject such as interests and needs that efcient government is to manage at
a distance. Rights are, then, reinterpreted as necessary to the operation of
autonomous processes (of the economy, population and society) which are both
external to political authority and necessary to its ends.12 However, beyond fea-
turing as essential vehicles of the government of rightful citizens, they are, in
fact, considered to be productive of these: Democratic citizensare both the
effects and the instruments of liberal governance.13
In Barbara Cruikshanks famous terms, subjects of government are fabricated
through technologies of citizenship, such as the ethos of active citizenship or
the notion of empowerment.14 Giving rise to the self-governing subject of ef-
cient government, it is by means of these technologies that (neo)liberal govern-
mentality attempts to reconcile the divergent requirements of political power
wielded over legal subjects and pastoral power wielded over live individuals.15
The limitations on the governments space of manoeuvre drawn by the rights of
the free citizen and the laws of economic dynamics are thus amended by mould-
ing autonomous subjects, so that complying with governmental objectives will
be in their own interest. As Cruikshanks analysis of the early 1990s US self-
esteem movement aptly illustrates, citizenship and rights are mobilised to justify
practices of self-renewal, bringing about the synchronicity of personal and soci-
etal interests, and thereby avoiding more direct forms of state control or costly
programmes of intervention.16 Yet this element of synchronicity embodies the
 Third World Quarterly 1079

very danger of such technologies. In linking subject and power through the
practice of self-government and thus the sentiment of free choice, it amounts to
subjects happy self-alignment with governmental rationalities. Indeed, when
constructed in terms of free choice, subjection to power becomes all too tempt-
ing: However limited many of the choices we make might seem to be, the
appeal of self-governance is one that is extremely difcult to resist.17 In turn,
the critical call of the governmentality literature is to reveal the extent to which
we are already self-governing and to point to particular ways we are made to
comply.18
In the spirit of that call Louiza Odysseos argues that, instead of attempt[s]
to concretize liberalisms commitment to individual freedom, human rights
should be viewed as a technology of subjectication.19 Promoted by interna-
tional institutions and global civil society actors, they are instrumental in creat-
ing the self-governing subject as homo juridicus who, in turn, complements the
neoliberal ideal of the entrepreneurial homo conomicus shaped by other
means.20 Odysseos thus shows that liberalism has an intimate relationship with
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freedom but not because it is predicated upon the pregiven, free and sovereign
individual; rather, liberal governmental practice requires and indeed must
produce, and produce globallythe free and sovereignsubject.21 Conse-
quently government should be understood as dependent upon creating both the
conditions of freedom and the subject able to exercise that freedom.22 Hence
through the subjectifying technology of (human) rights, freedom is recongured
as a particular relationship between the governor and the governed, one that
allows for and, in fact, demands the rule of maximum economy.23 Similarly to
technologies of citizenship studied by Cruikshank, then, (human) rights are here
revealed as themselves producing freedom; a kind of freedom that, in encourag-
ing self-government, is conducive to (neo)liberal governmental rationalities and,
at the same time, inverts the liberal tradition of rights of rights against the
state, or against government.24
In such acts of disclosure we can begin to trace how the governmentality
literature sets limits to thinking about the emancipatory potentials of human
rights.25 Through these conceptual gestures, I suggest, the freedom of the self-
governing (neo)liberal subject, considered to be the product of governmentalised
human rights, peels off of the freedom of the sovereign subject which, as in the
above quote from Sokhi-Bulley, remains posited as the nominal addressee of
rights declarations. Adapting Rancires reading of the Marxist dismissal of lib-
eral rights (for embodying a politics that masks the real movement of society,
i.e. class struggle), in this doubling we might witness how the codied freedom
of rights emerges as illusionary.26 Although supposedly superseded by the homo
conomicus, the freedom of the autonomous liberal subject is retained in these
accounts as both their appeal and their other. This is made rather clear in
Nikolas Roses juxtaposition referring to the formation of the self-governing
subject: Achieving freedom becomes a matter not of slogans nor of political
revolution, but of slow, painstaking and detailed work on our own subjective
and personal realities.27 In turn, subjection to (neo)liberal government is all the
more profound because it appears to emanate from our autonomous quest for
ourselves, it appears as a matter of our freedom.28 As even more clearly formu-
lated by Sokhi-Bulley: actors govern themselvesbelieving that they are
 1080 A. Selmeczi

engaged in an aesthetics of existence gesturing towards autonomy and less

government.29
The trouble with the notion of appearance put forward in these arguments
occurs when, in analyses of (neo)liberal governmental rationalities, it becomes
reied through rendering governmental discourses as ontological. By presenting
these as internally consistent and self-identical, governmentality scholarship
slips into an understanding of the (neo)liberal discourse of rule as the actually
existing order of power.30 Thereby, albeit subtly, it tends to reproduce an
account of the truth of power that is inevitably juxtaposed to the illusion of free-
dom. Especially in light of claims about the rightful subjects complete sub-
sumption by the homo conomicus,31 and the conceptual equation of
governmentality with politics,32 the implications of such juxtaposition for think-
ing about the power dynamics of subject formation need to be carefully
assessed. To what extent can we retain the conception of power as always
already reversible, if the freedom supposedly allowing for this reversal is tied to
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its (neo)liberal iteration? And what does it say about the cognitive relations
between the governed and the agents of government if we assume that govern-
ment through freedom occurs by deception? As in his review of the recent
literature on the crisis of human rights, Anthony J Langlois argues:

The subjectivities facilitated by the politics of human rights might converge with
those needed for liberal imperialism, but this does not make them the culprit or
cause. This demonstrates the problem with many of these critical approaches: such
relationships are set in stone and made necessary. Human rights become necessary
accomplices in the governmentalization of international politics, or suffer guilt
by association when it comes to the imposition of neoliberal solutions in the glo-
bal economy. Such an approach risks leaving those for whom human rights are
genuinely emancipatory high and dry, with nowhere to go and this would indeed
be a crisis for human rights.33

Cautioning against the limits that sustaining the notion of such crisis sets to the
critical capacity of governmentality literature, the next section turns to the resi-
due, the marginal, the surplus. Looking at technologies of power deployed on
subjects superuous to economic government is telling of modes of rule that
render the codied freedom of rights more than merely illusionary. Instead, that
freedom emerges as an excess which, through the letter of the law, gains
articulation precisely in struggles around knowledge.

Political illiteracy and excess freedom

Exposing the fact that (neo)liberal governmental technologies frequently turn
illiberal indeed, despotic scholars like Mariana Valverde and Barry Hindess
have already called attention to the importance of interrogating the limits of
governing through freedom. Rather than further claims about the government of
unfreedom, however, here I engage the liminal for it demonstrates that, in
continuing to grapple with questions of freedom heterogeneous to that of the
neoliberal self-governing subject, contemporary rationalities of rule run up
against the threat posed by the very framework of liberal rights and freedoms.
 Third World Quarterly 1081

As the discussion below suggests, discursive and material techniques aimed at

redrawing the boundaries of the properly political community do indeed
manifest attempts at containing a certain reality of rights.
Prominent among the various notions of freedom that sneak back on the
margins of neoliberal mentalities of rule is the freedom of the surplus popula-
tion: the freedom of lives whose capacities cannot be rendered useful and,
according to the rule of maximum economy, are not to be nurtured. But how
is the incompatibility between the properly entrepreneurial subject and the
inconvenient presence of those whom the neoliberal economy cannot possibly
accommodate to be reconciled? And how does power engage the freedom of
those who cannot be efciently and/or securely rendered as economic subjects?
In South Africa, where the abolition of racial minority rule and the codica-
tion of universal equality has just turned 20 years old, the threat of the excess
freedom of the economically and politically redundant people is perhaps more
tangible than elsewhere, where the role of popular mobilisation in mass
emancipation has long been forgotten.34 This is why it might be easier to trace
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especially when one is attentive to discourses of resistance the ways in which

the collective political subject (i.e. the People) is being recalibrated, partly by
separating it from the masses of nominally liberated but superuous people.
Testifying to a complex dynamic of shaping the political and economic commu-
nity in the context of governing the urban order, such efforts are perceptible in,
for instance, the regulation of street trade. While legitimised through references
to the universal accessibility of people spaces, the formalisation process ends
up excluding the poorest segment of the survivalist economy the supposed
heroes of neoliberal development.35 Likewise, through the codication and para-
noid deployment of public violence and the all-pervasive media parlance of
service delivery protests, the demonstrative use of public spaces is physically
impeded and discursively reduced and marginalised, thus at the same time con-
structing their subjects as less than political. Furthermore, the recent intensica-
tion of police brutality,36 the regular attacks on grassroots activists, including
their assassination, often with the complicity local ofcials,37 and the consistent
pattern of illegal evictions are all enabled by the construction of the urban poor
as falling beyond the scope of the community of rightful subjects.38
Instead of encouraging the alignment of personal interests with those of the
whole society, then, the spatio-aesthetic order of the city and thereby the allot-
ment of abandonment are maintained through technologies whose success
depends on delineating the surplus population by positing them as less than
equal citizens. The signicance of Abahlalis politics in this regard is their
enactments of equality by disrupting the cognitive order that parallels and rein-
forces such urban aesthetics. Through a practice that centres on claims of equal
intelligence, the shack-dwellers expose technologies of power that expel the sur-
plus people from the properly political community by attributing to them the
condition that I call political illiteracy,39 by rendering them ignorant and intel-
lectually incapable of living up to the proper practice of freedom, be it that of
the economic subject or of the subject of right.40 This is all the more apparent
in Abahlalis litigious practice discussed below, for it displaces the very tech-
niques of rule that seek to dene the meaning of freedom by restricting the poli-
tico-aesthetic eld within which rights are available for emancipatory
 1082 A. Selmeczi

appropriation.41 Such struggles around the (legible) letter of the law struggles
that hinge upon codied rights assumed reality are imperceptible if we retain
the juxtaposition between the reality of governmental rationalities and the
illusion of freedom.

Literariness: the excess of words

That the containment of excess freedom is very much an aesthetic matter of
locations and voices, of sensibility understood both as what makes sense and
what is available for the senses,42 is clearly exemplied in the event of a public
hearing of the infamous Slums Act,43 staged by the provincial legislature at
the Community Hall of the Kennedy Road settlement where Abahlalis central
ofce was located at the time.44 Members of the provincial government arrived
with a substantial police presence, accompanied by members of local branches
of the African National Congress (ANC), who, as it later turned out, were
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misinformed about the purpose of the meeting: they were told it would be about
the allocation of houses. As the movement recalls:

Abahlali had a tremendous day on Friday ([4] May 2007). The provincial govern-
ment came to Kennedy Road in their [convoy] of fancy cars to present their Slum
Elimination Bill. It started with a police helicopter circling low over the settlement
and riot police (and [Glen] Nayager [senior superintendent of the Sydenham
Police] in his BMW) taking positions around the settlement to make it clear who
was in charge before the discussion started.45

The public hearing started with the legislators reading aloud a summary of the
Bill, after which the oor was opened up for the public to pose questions and
comments at a microphone. Soon, however, some restrictions were introduced.
Although the Bill was not read out in its entirety at the hearing, neither was it
distributed in advance or at the event, claiming that too few speakers were
addressing the Bill, legislators impeded attendees questions concerning hous-
ing, services, and the circumstances of the evictions that the Bill would pre-
scribe. They did so by imposing a rule, according to which no one could speak
at the microphone unless they rst could cite a section of the Bill about which
they intended to make a comment.46
In reaction to what they thought was their undue silencing, and in order to
have their muted questions responded to, after the exercise Abahlali formed a
Slums Bill Elimination Task Team that engaged in a common line by line
reading and discussion of the legislation and encouraged all interested shack-
dwellers to discuss it at a public meeting that followed.47 As is now known, the
long journey that started around the time of this meeting and proceeded From
shack to Constitutional Court the motto embroidered on the T-shirts that
movement members wore at the Constitutional Court hearing ended with the
constitutional invalidation of the Slums Act, and thus Abahlalis victory.48 That,
however, was neither the beginning nor the end of Abahlalis political struggle.
The moment of the shack-dwellers disruptive emancipation is to be traced back
to their self-declarations as intelligent, speaking beings aware of the unjustied
terms of their allotment:
 Third World Quarterly 1083

The Premier of KZN [KwaZulu-Natal] has rubbished us in public saying we are

ignorant and havent read this Bill well, we will turn the tide and show him
when we meet in court if this Bill becomes a law. If our challenge comes to court,
we will mobilize in our numbers to ll the courts and create what they call
chaos but which is actually the disciplined, democratic power of the people.49

As the close reading of this quote suggests, the text of the law, in this case the
Slums Bill, functions as the material basis for Abahlali to disrupt the sensible
governmental order and defy attempts at restricting the sensible realm of rights.
At once physically and symbolically, the shack-dwellers invade the space of the
law: they ll the courtrooms and, at the same time, by appropriating the name
of the people, the space where institutions of popular sovereignty and
citizenship rights are presumed to operate.
Similarly demonstrating how knowledge claims make an impact on the
physical reality of the city and thus disrupt its political order, mobilising the
knowledge of its rights enabled the movement to stop illegal evictions in
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KwaZulu-Natal for several years.50 Although one could argue that the shack-
dwellers litigation and the verbal references to their rights enshrined in the
Constitution signify the success of liberal ontogenesis,51 from the perspective
of the obscure terrain of citizenship that spaces of abandonment represent, we
might instead interpret such acts of defying the most direct form of their oppres-
sion the imposition of forced mobility as acts of political disruption realised
through technologies of citizenship. This is suggested not so much by the
shack-dwellers actual legal successes against the City or the provincial munici-
pality, although of course these also play a role, but by the subjectifying force
that simply knowing their rights materialises in bringing about their resistant
mobilisation.52 As in the case of the public hearing, it is by declaring them-
selves as knowledgeable that assuming their rights introduces a crack in the
urban aesthetics of abandonment. As Mazwi Nzimande, then chairperson of
Abahlalis Youth League recalls regarding the municipalitys attempt to evict the
inhabitants of the Joe Slovo settlement, where he himself lived at the time,
knowing what the conditions of a lawful eviction were and that the community
had the right to refuse relocation, could mean all the difference:

When they [the Land Invasion Unit] came for the second time to threaten us, it
was too late for them because we knew that no, they cant evict us in such a short
notice, so we start resisting and then they did not return [] But they did not
come because they know now: those people know something, unlike before, you
know. Before, when they said anything, we should just do it, just like that, but
now we know that we also have rights!53

As many accounts of Abahlali members testify, shack-dwellers conceive of their

becoming resistant as a process of learning, particularly about their rights.54 In
deance of governmental agents assumption that acting illegally is permissible
on the urban margins,55 in these instances the letter of the law makes space for
politics. Defying the logic according to which equality enshrined in rights
declarations is abstract or illusionary and is contradicted by the truth of social
inequality or that of neoliberal freedom, then, words of equality are taken
 1084 A. Selmeczi

literally in these events and, exposing the very arbitrariness of inequality, they
are being proven true.
Theorising the possibility of such acts of (re-)appropriation, Jacques Rancire
states that equality exists somewhere; it is spoken of and written about. It must
therefore be veriable.56 Corresponding to his neo-Kantian understanding of
aesthetics as an ordering of that which presents itself to the sense experience,
Rancire attributes materiality to written words and, thereby, posits their equal
availability to every speaking being. Preguring the current fear of the enact-
ment of excess freedom, Platos intention to banish sophists and poets from the
city, he suggests, articulates an attempt to contain such free availability:

The silent word of writing, according to Plato, is that which will sway no matter
what making itself equally available both to those entitled to use it and to those
who are not. The availability of a series of words lacking a legitimate speaker and
an equally legitimate interlocutor interrupts Platos logic of the proper a logic
that requires everyone to be in their proper place, partaking in their proper
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affairs.57

Literariness, then, denotes this potentially disruptive excess of words,58 with

excess referring to words free availability to any potential readers interpreta-
tion, their capacity for circulation which, in turn, the materiality of writing
allows for. This is what lends rights the potential for appropriation through
demonstrations of equality, that is, through acts proving that those who demand
to be treated equally share the very world within which equality is spoken of
and written about, they share the same conguration of the given with those
who deny them equal treatment. Equality that is enshrined as a potentiality in
legal/political texts is turned into emancipation through acts that prove the irra-
tionality of the reality of social inequality by demonstrating ones equal capacity
to speak, reason, write poetry, talk about electricity cut-offs and participatory
development, or interpret legal texts.59 Such is the way rights continue to have
reality, according to Rancire: instead of being mere abstractions, they exist in
two forms. First, they are material inscriptions of the community as free and
equal; second, they appear through the verication of such inscriptions.60 The
Rights of Man are the rights of those who make something out of that inscrip-
tion, deciding not only to use their rights, but also to build cases to verify the
power of the inscription.61
Resonating with the contested scene of the Slums Act hearing and contrary
to a conception of codied freedom as an illusion re-coded and instrumentalised
by governmental rationalities, through the conception of humans as literary ani-
mals confounded by the excess of words,62 Rancire draws attention to the
very aim of those in power to stabilise the hierarchy of signication:

Humans are political animalsfor two reasons: rst, because we have the power
to put into circulation more words, useless and unnecessary words, words that
exceed the function of rigid designation; second, because this fundamental ability
to proliferate words is unceasingly contested by those who claim to speak cor-
rectly that is, by the masters of designation and classication who, by virtue of
wanting to retain their status and power, at-out deny this capacity to speak.63
 Third World Quarterly 1085

Literary therapy: the limits of the governmentality critique

This is then the perspective from which, I suggest, we rethink the governmental-
ity account of subjectication through human rights or technologies of (neo)lib-
eral citizenship. Taking a closer look at how, as I argued, the truth of power is
constructed in this literature in juxtaposition to the illusionary words of (human)
rights, following OMalley et al, we might attribute the ensuing limitations to
particular methodological choices:

Because of its emphasis on the programmatic nature of rule, and concomitant

methodological focus on texts of government rather than what they [governmen-
tality scholars] refer to as the messy actualities of governance or on the constitu-
tive role of contestation and social variation, the literature tends to generate ideal
typications which often are in danger of being little more than the systematized
self-representation of rule. [] The consequence of this kind of explanatory strat-
egy has been the reduction of politics to a mentality of rule.64
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Yet, where politics is conceptually reduced to mentalities of rule formulated in

texts of government, the power of signication will remain with the authors.65
The gap that constructing freedom as illusionary opens between the words of
the law and those of governmental rationalities is thus ossied, because subjecti-
cation is assumed to operate through a specic notion of the social good, from
the top down.66 While the crux of the governmentality approach is the com-
mendable argument that the governed are implicated in their government, since
the conduct of conduct works through the construction of their freedom, agents
of governmentality philanthropists, policy experts, public health professionals
and politicians, to name a few67 seem to have a monopoly over dening
the notion of freedom, a notion of freedom that is conducive to economic
government.
Illustrative of this unidirectional rendering of subjectication and its relation-
ship to the textual reality of governmental power is Cruikshanks exemplication
of Gloria Steinems programme of self-esteem.68 One of the main tools of Stei-
nems technology of empowerment which Cruikshank rightly interprets as a
technology of making people governable is what she calls bibliotherapy.
Comprising a set of literary techniques that include the writing of autobiogra-
phies and storytelling, bibliotherapy supposedly induces self-esteem through the
recognition that societal improvement depends on individuals ability to over-
come problems such as, say, criminality and addiction. A self emerges out of
confrontation with texts[as n]arratives bring people to see that the details of
their personal lives are inextricably linked to what is good for all of society.69
Clearly, as opposed to the free sway of the letter, the assumption here is that the
literary process is under the complete control of the biblio-therapist, within the
tutelary power of the agents of specialized knowledge.70 But is it really
possible to predict the outcome of textual encounter with such certainty? Or
does the presumption of inequality that underlies this unidirectional account of
textual reception unduly curb the critical capacity of governmentality studies? If
so, it might risk falling precisely into line with technologies of power which, as
shown above, operate through the very production of cognitive inequality.
 1086 A. Selmeczi

Conclusion
To be sure, while the above account of Abahlalis litigious politics allows or,
indeed, demands that we consider the emancipatory potential of (human) rights,
it does not necessarily offer clues as to how these moments of disruption can be
maintained, how an emancipatory politics is to be practised. In fact, as the press
statement announcing the movements celebration of the Constitutional Courts
judgment suggests, besides the devastation of the September 2009 violent attack
on the movement in the Kennedy Road settlement which members mostly
attributed to the publicity that the case had received Abahlali was well aware
that the invalidation of the Slums Act would not obstruct the municipalitys ille-
gal actions or prevent the reintroduction of the legislation in a different form.71
Correspondingly, although members acclaimed the judgment, their views on the
power of litigation and rights were neither uniform nor necessarily optimistic.72
They were, mostly, strategic.73 That, however, might be perfectly sufcient for
taking literally the freedom codied in liberal rights, and using it to restructure
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the biopolitical order where the shack-dwellers allotment is abandonment and

political illiteracy.
In all likelihood technologies of abandonment will continue to accompany
the neoliberal project of tending the ideal environment of market competition.
At the same time those denied physical space and political existence will con-
tinue to debase such technologies by taking literally their legally inscribed
equality. In the face of these dynamics the task of critical scholarship might be
to remain attentive and conceptually open to popular struggles and be wary of
analytics of power that render freedom as illusionary and the work of rights as
contained by governmental reason. As Abahlalis contestation of being ruled
through (il)legality demonstrated, denying people the capacity to understand and
resignify the terms of their conduct belongs to a rationality of power that
assesses the value of life and orders our sensible reality accordingly.

Acknowledgements
The nancial assistance of the South African National Research Foundation (NRF) towards this research is
hereby acknowledged. Opinions expressed and conclusions arrived at, are those of the author and are not
necessarily to be attributed to the NRF. I am grateful to Michael Merlingen, Gary Minkley, Louiza Odysseos,
Erzsebet Strausz, Kiven Strohm, and the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier
versions of this paper. For their input, I also thank the participants of the 2013 European Workshops in
International Studies in Tartu, Estonia.

Notes on contributor
Anna Selmeczi is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the South African Research
Chair Initiative: Social Change, hosted by the University of Fort Hare in East
London, South Africa. She has published on the rationalities and technologies
of abandonment in the context of the neoliberal city, the disruptive potentials of
grassroots politics in the face thereof, as well as the knowledge practices of the
South African shack-dwellers movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo. Her current
research, conducted in Cape Town, centres on the notion of political conscious-
ness and the knowledge dynamics involved in the pedagogical and artistic
practices of urban social movements.
 Third World Quarterly 1087

Notes
1. See primarily Foucault, Society Must Be Defended; Foucault, Security, Territory, Population; and
Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics.
2. Foucault, The Subject and Power.
3. See Agamben, Homo Sacer.
4. Opposing Giorgio Agambens reading, this perspective is usually aligned with accounts more loyal to
Foucault, where biopolitics is supposed to overshadow, yet not completely replace, sovereign power. See
Neal, Cutting off the Kings Head; Neal, Review of the Literature; and Ojakangas, Impossible Dia-
logue on Bio-power. See also Bondi and Laurie, Introduction.
5. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 22. Lacking the space here for a thorough elaboration, I signal my
understanding of how biopolitics relates to (neo)liberalism and their respective governmentalities with
reference to Foucaults claim that liberalism should be studied as the general framework of biopolitics.
6. Rygiel, In Life through Death. See also Isin and Nielsen, Acts of Citizenship; and Isin and Nyers,
Routledge Handbook of Global Citizenship Studies.
7. See McNevin, Political Belonging in a Neoliberal Era; Nyers, Abject Cosmopolitanism; and
Guillaume, Regimes of Citizenship. I thank one of my anonymous referees for reminding me of the
signicance of this body of texts.
8. By the end of the 2000s Abahlali baseMjondolo (shack-dwellers in isiZulu) had become one of the
largest social movements in South Africa, counting over 10,000 members. Following a series of
inhabitants demonstrations, it was formed in 2005 in the Kennedy Road shack settlement of Clare
Downloaded by [Anna Selmeczi] at 07:27 04 July 2015

Estate, Durban. See Abahlali baseMjondolo, Izwi Labampofu Voice of the Poor. For a thorough
documentation and analysis of the movements emergence, see Pithouse, Our Struggle is Though on
the Ground, Running. I conducted research with Abahlali baseMjondolo in two phases between 2009
and 2010. Research comprised daily visits to the movements central ofce in the Kennedy road shack
settlement and occasionally to other settlements in eThekwini (Greater Durban), conducting interviews
with members individually or in small groups, and observing (and taking part in) the movements
activities.
9. Selmeczi, Dis/placing Political Illiteracy.
10. Burchell et al., The Foucault Effect; and Burchell, Liberal Government.
11. Ivison, Rights; Rose, Governing the Soul; and Rose, The Death of the Social?
12. Dean, Governmentality, 50.
13. Cruikshank, The Will to Empower, 4.
14. For the sake of brevity, the following discussion of the governmentality literatures account of (human)
rights is reduced to a handful of its paradigmatic arguments, focusing on their implicit knowledge
dynamics. For further discussions of rights as/in relation to governmentality, see Chase, Legitimizing
Human Rights; Ivison, Rights; Jabri, War and the Transformation of Global Politics; Jung, The Politics
of Indigenous Identity; Lindroth, Indigenous Rights; Lindroth and Sinevaara-Niskanen, At the Cross-
roads of Autonomy and Essentialism; Lindroth and Sinevaara-Niskanen, Adapt or Die?; Rose, The
Death of the Social?; Sokhi-Bulley, Human Rights; Zanotti, Normalizing Democracy and Human
Rights; and Zanotti, Governing Disorder. For alternative readings from within Foucauldian thought, see
Cadman, How (not) to be Governed; Golder and Fitzpatrick, Foucaults Law; Golder, Re-reading
Foucault; and Patton, Foucault, Critique and Rights.
15. Foucault, Omnes et Singulatim, 307.
16. Cruikshank, Revolutions Within. For similar insights regarding contemporary governmentalities of the
European Union, see Sokhi-Bulley, Human Rights: actors governthemselves, without coercion or
the need for a coercive body (p. 240).
17. Bondi and Laurie, Introduction, 399.
18. Cruikshank, Revolutions Within.
19. Odysseos, Human Rights, 747.
20. See also Levy, Contested Citizenship of the Arab Spring: [neoliberal governmentality] construes a
specic kind of citizen, congured exhaustively as homo conomicus (p. 30).
21. Odysseos, Human Rights, 749750 (emphasis in the original).
22. Ibid., 753.
23. Ibid., 772. See also Lindroth, Indigenous Rights: The expert interpretation of indigenous rights
actively produces the indigenous populations aspirations and aims as compatible with the neoliberal
logic (p. 355).
24. Sokhi-Bulley, Human Rights, 241 (emphasis in the original).
25. It has to be noted, however, that Odysseos does engage the issue of rights struggles. See, for example,
her contribution to this volume.
26. Rancire, Disagreement, 82. For a challenge to Rancires interpretation of this binary and thus his
conception of metapolitics, see Fisken, The Visibility of Politics.
27. Rose, Governing the Soul, 253.
28. Ibid., 256.
29. Sokhi-Bulley, Human Rights, 240; emphasis in the original.
 1088 A. Selmeczi

30. Valverde, Despotism and Ethical Liberal Governance, 357.

31. Golder and Fitzpatrick, Foucaults Law.
32. Singer and Weir, Politics and Sovereign Power.
33. Langlois, Human Rights in Crisis?
34. See Chandler, The Rise and Limits of Biopolitical Critiques.
35. City of Durban, Warwick Junction Developments.
36. Duncan, Thabo Mbeki and Dissent.
37. Abahlali, Thuli Ndlovu was Assassinated Last Night.
38. Beyond lacking a court order justifying the process, evictions usually executed by the police and/or
municipal Land Invasion Units are illegal for failing to consult and notify inhabitants in advance or to
advise them that they have a legal right to oppose removal. See Abahlali, Another Political Eviction;
Butler and Pithouse, Lessons from eThekwini; and Sacks, Marikana UnFreedom Day Land
Occupation.
39. Selmeczi, Dis/placing Political Illiteracy.
40. See, for example, Abahlalis statement on the occasion of the prohibition of its Human Rights Day
march with reference to the renovation of the Durban City Hall and the safety risks thereof: The Free-
dom Charter said that the people will govern. It didnt say that the experts will govern. It didnt say
that there will be democracy if the city managers decide to allow it. Abahlali, Sutcliffes Dirty Tricks.
41. My understanding of the aesthetic nature of politics draws on Rancires thought. Rancire, The Politics
of Aesthetics.
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42. Panagia, The Political Life of Sensation.

43. KwaZulu-Natal Elimination and Prevention of Re-emergence of Slums Act of 2006.
44. The public participation exercise took place on 4 May 2007. See Chance, Report on Public Participation
Exercises.
45. Abahlali, No Land, No House, No Vote, No Bill!.
46. Chance, Report on Public Participation Exercises.
47. Abahlali, Meeting to Build a Coalition. On the signicance of students engagement with the text of
the proposed legislation at the centre of the 1986 student strike in Paris, see Rancire, On the Shores of
Politics.
48. Abahlali, Celebrating our Victory. See also Kell and Nizza, From Shack to the Constitutional Court.
49. Abahlali, Meeting to Build a Coalition.
50. Unfortunately, this victory has since been reversed and illegal evictions become normal again.
51. Odysseos, Human Rights, 771.
52. Below I draw on and extend the some of the discussion in Selmeczi, From Shack to the Constitutional
Court.
53. Interview with Mazwi Nzimande, July 8, 2009. See also the scene in Dear Mandela where, after
commonly reading the Housing Section of the Constitution, former Abahlali spokesperson, Mnikelo Nda-
bankulu talks to a group of recently evicted people: We will rebuild these shacks but these people will
come back tomorrow. When they do you must ask them Where are your court documents? And if you
want to demolish my house, you have to produce a court order. And if you do bulldoze it, who is going
to compensate me? He will think to himself I thought I was dealing with an idiot!. Kell and
Nizza, Dear Mandela. See also Jaraisy, For West Bank Protesters.
54. Regrettably, here I lack the space to support this point with such accounts. See Selmeczi, Dis/placing
Political Illiteracy.
55. Butler and Pithouse, Lessons from eThekwini.
56. Rancire, On the Shores of Politics, 47.
57. Rancire and Panagia, Dissenting Words, 115.
58. Ibid., 113.
59. Rancire, On the Shores of Politics, 48.
60. Rancire, Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?, 302.
61. Ibid., 303.
62. Rancire and Panagia, Dissenting Words, 115.
63. Ibid., 11.
64. OMalley et al., Governmentality, Criticism, Politics, 502.
65. Signicantly the acts of citizenship literature, which does account for the reversibility of government
through rights, tends to draw on ethnographic methods. See, for example, Isin and Nyers, Routledge
Handbook of Global Citizenship Studies.
66. Binkley, The Work of Neoliberal Governmentality; and Kerr, Beheading the King.
67. Cruikshank, Revolutions Within, 234.
68. See ibid; and Cruikshank, The Will to Empower.
69. Cruikshank, Revolutions Within, 233234.
70. Cruikshank, The Will to Empower.
71. Abahlali, Celebrating our Victory.
 Third World Quarterly 1089

72. For example, interview with Zama Ndlovu, July 8, 2009. See also Selmeczi, We are the People Who
do Not Count.
73. We go to court to conrm the rights that have been won in prior struggles but we are very clear that
the only real defense for these rights, and the only way to win new rights, is through the power of the
organized poor. Abahlali, Sutcliffes Dirty Tricks.

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