Population and Belonging: Performativity, Identity and (National) Relationality
The idea that a subject belongs to a population circulates through a range of governance
discourses, including citizenship, border protection and public health. Such belonging is an
integral element of the contemporary performativity of identity. One belongs to the
population of Australia, or of the United Kingdom, or of Serbia in ways which are at once
both complex and over-simplified in popular discourse. Or, within the same discursive
formations, one belongs at a more minute level to various other forms of groupings that are
coded as populations: regional or urban groups (the Western Australian population; the
population of London), or groups determined by age or lifecycle (the population of
schoolchildren in Papua New Guinea; the university population; the population of retirees).
Additionally, belonging is presented in biological terms, frequently in combination with forms
of citizenship, nationalism and hybridity (the immigrant population; the population of
Vietnamese-Australians) or in ways which are bio-corporeal (the population of diabetes
suffers). However, to belong to a population means more than simply being classified as a
member of a category, nationality, group or person residing in a particular locale. Such a
perception of the idea of population reduces belonging to forms of similitude. Belonging to a
population, rather, is manufactured and this is achieved through mechanisms that encourage
and foster a deep sense of attachment to ‘a’ or ‘the’ population as a relational grouping of a
significant mass of others in order to stabilise identity and subjectivity as recognisable and
intelligible.
This paper addresses some of the ways in which population operates as a figure of
belonging. Utilising Judith Butler’s theories of performativity, it is argued that the discursive
concept of population—most frequently presented in terms of the peoples of a nation-state—
is a figure to which subjects develop a deep sense of attachment in order to perform self1
identity with coherence, intelligibility and in the context of identity as always relational. In
that sense, population provides a node for the everyday practice of making sense of
relationality as the means through which belonging is manufactured. Relationality, in this
context, is a standpoint which allows us to think the self-other relationship in terms of the
complexities of the process of becoming and identity (Venn). I will begin with a brief
overview of the concept of population and the means by which it is dominated by the idea of
the nation, followed by a discussion of identity as performative in the context of modes of
attachment and belonging in which population stands in for relationality in a mass society.
This leads to two additional questions: how belonging is manufactured in the context of the
domination of the population concepts by nationalism and how nation-state regulation plays
a role in manufacturing that form of belonging. In both of these cases, it is in the inter-play
between the discursive construct of ‘nation’ and the everyday experience of the use of
national infrastructure that a sense of belonging to national populations—as opposed to
other groupings of people—is forged.
Population
In etymological terms, the concept of population in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
was determined by a relationship of people to place, whereby a population referred to a
place that was peopled or inhabited. With the advent of European Enlightenment thinking
and the techniques of record-keeping and measurement that they brought, a gradual shift in
the meaning of the term began, whereby understanding or knowing a population meant
analysing groups of people in terms of measuring objectively the ranges and forms that the
group takes in terms of ratios and statistical data. In its simplest sociological sense,
population refers to collections or groups of human beings, the nuances within that
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collectivity and the knowledge that such collections establish about a particular society,
region, group or mass in question. Most frequently, knowledge of population is encountered
publicly via demography (the statistical study of human populations) which itself is a set of
discursive arrangements operating in service of governance for the management and
conduct of subjects in large-scale or mass formations.
As a figure of belonging, the concept of population takes a number of forms although it is
regularly produced in connection with nationhood and national belonging (Yuval-Davis).
This is despite the increasing circulation of the idea of globalisation which, as a political,
cultural and analytic force has been criticised for a tendency to universalise conditions,
culture and histories (Radhakrishnan xxvii) and for sponsoring the invisibilisation of the local
and the regional as sites of identity, culture and belonging (Radhakrishnan 37-38, 59). In
population terms, however, globalisation and cosmopolitanism have presented important
challenges to the discourses which have, for more than two centuries, fostered the
dominance of the nation as the determinant of the meaning of population and popular
identity, and this has occurred particularly through studies that point to the fact that the
sovereign nation-state has, for some time now, been confronted by transnational and supranational forces (McNevin 658-659). As sociological factors which challenge the nationalist
determination of the concepts of population, migration, globalisation and cosmopolitanism
complexify identity today through presenting competing discourses and demands for
belonging. Consumption and consumerism, for example, are increasingly figured as a part
of the general shift in the construction of identity away from any claim to an inner authenticity
or belonging that centres itself on the ties of kinship and place towards the fluidity of
consumption as the means by which performance is made in late contemporary capitalist
cultures (Jameson). Consumption of global products and services, particularly in the areas
of clothing and fashion but also travel, tourism and electronic goods, are part of this identity
work. Yet many countries and their local industries simultaneously promote a ‘buy local’
imperative through codes of national identity, indicating some of the ways in which
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globalisation produces a push-and-pull relationship between national population and other
forms of belonging through which identities are figured and made intelligible.
Modalities of Identity and Belonging (to Population)
Given that the concept of population—or, rightly, the competing and multiple concepts of
population—are interrelated with how we think about, define and construct identity, it is
important to ask what are the mechanisms by which concepts of population operate to
condition identity and belonging in contemporary western cultures. Our individual and
collective identities are performed through belonging in the context of population—a
discursively-given concept that is structured by various forces, including varying degrees and
understandings of nationalism as well as governance power mechanisms, including the
biopolitical controls on the movement of bodies from without the population, the births and
deaths of subjects from the population, the administrative functions that manage, rate and
sometimes punish difference and diversity. Although the concept of population is usually
disseminated through discourses of demographics, border control, fertility and urban
planning, it is highly significant to the everyday ways in which we perform our subjectivity as
it is one of several sites or nodes of relational belonging—how we make selfhood intelligible
in the context of those around us, on whom we are absolutely dependent for coherence and
recognisability. There are other sites or nodes such as kinship, communicative
mechanisms, disciplinarity within institutions to which we belong or through which identity is
made intelligible. Yet the notion of population is remarkably significant also in constituting
how power is deployed through those sites or institutions, thus how our identities are
performative in those contexts.
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What, then, are the mechanisms by which subjectivity is constituted through the concept of
belonging to a given population? In the introduction to their volume on contemporary
population growth, Wolfgang Lutz and Warren Sanderson make the valuable point that
population is significant to each individual. They note that the topic of population growth or
change directly touches ‘upon the lives of almost everybody’ whether through academic and
scientific analysis of public debate or population representations of belonging (3). Indeed,
they argue that it is more endemic to everyday life than we usually imagine population to be
in terms of the role of governance and administration in managing populations:
Everyone has a family of origin of one form or another that is of the
highest emotional importance. A large number of people either
have or are considering having children. Similarly, most people
are involved in the labor market and are concerned personally
about the security of their pensions. However, even aggregatelevel population considerations beyond personal experience and
based on abstract reasoning about conditions in the rather distant
future tend to excite people. Obviously, questions concerning
changes in the size and structure of our own species, our nation,
or our ethnic group interest us in a rather existential way. Even
many people who do not subscribe to collective goals and who are
interested only in the possible implications of population trends for
their own welfare believe that, at least in the medium to long run,
population trends do matter, be it in terms of population growth or
population aging. . . . [I]t is not surprising that people hold deeply
felt, but divergent, views about our demographic future (3).
This ‘deeply felt’ centrality of concerns about population and its relation to everyday life is the
result of the passionate attachment one has to the concept of population as the site through
which normativities and commonalities are made sensible—to be a subject means to be
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dependent on norms derived through relationality with others which, in a masscommunication society, is presented through normative ranges given in population. In other
words, population is a site for the manufacture of belonging as it codes and presents the
forms of normative relationality that are necessary for coherent subjectivity. Population is
thus a complex and multifaceted discursive node for which subjects are compelled to have
an attachment in order to perform identity in modes of coherent and intelligible belonging in a
(continuing) mass society. Shifts in population, changes in how it is perceived, critiques of
the nation-state definer of population—all of these can upset such attachment and thus the
coherence of subjectivity, for they are strongly bound up with how our identities are made
recognisable to each other under the facet, or what I refer to as ‘co-ordinate’, of relational
(and frequently ‘national’) identity.
Judith Butler’s work on gender performativity lends itself best to making sense of the
relationship between historical discursive, linguistic and cultural factors and the production of
identity. In her earlier work, particularly Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, Butler
provided us with a Foucauldian-derived framework for understanding how subjectivity and
identity are constituted in language, culture and the available discourses in ways which
require us to perform our identities coherently and intelligibly in order to manufacture a
sense of belonging and participation in sociality necessary to meet the conditions of a
liveable life. Although Butler’s work is complex and wide-ranging, there are four significant
elements in understanding how identities can be understood as performative. Firstly,
following Nietzsche and Foucault, Butler articulates the ‘self’ not as a static, essentialist
being but as an effect of a performance that is constituted in and through language,
discourse and culture. Secondly, identity or selfhood is (non-voluntarily) performed
reiteratively as process ‘in accord’ with a discursively-given norm or set of norms. Through
the ongoingness of performance of the cited signifier or norm, a subject stabilises himself or
herself by producing a fiction of a fixed, inner, essential selfhood or subjectivity—this fiction
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is a retroactive production of an illusion that there is a core identity behind the performance,
a doer behind the deed (Bodies That Matter 12). Such performances are repetitive and
come to stabilise over time, retroactively producing the illusion that the performances
manifest from a fixed, inner identity core (Gender Trouble 143). That is, our actions and
performances do not stem from an inner essence but constitute it. In that context, identity is
the compulsion to reiterate ‘a norm or set of norms’ which ‘conceals or dissimulates the
conventions of which it is a repetition’ (Bodies That Matter 12). Thirdly, selves are
constituted in discourse and can therefore be re-constituted or reconfigured differently in the
encounter with different, alternative, emergent or imaginative discursive arrangements
(‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’ 18). This is particularly intelligible if subjectivity is
thought of as performative and thus requiring ongoing non-voluntary and non-conscious acts
of performance over time. Finally, the motivation to be articulated as a coherent, intelligible
self stems from a cultural imperative to perform identity in terms of coherence, intelligibility
and recognisability in order to be permitted belonging and social participation (Butler,
Psychic Life of Power 27), and to forge a sense of self and belonging across an array of
identity categories or co-ordinates—which include common axes of discrimination such as
gender, ethnicity, ability and age but might also be comprised of spurious experiences that
are less easily categorisable and less well demarcated in an identity/difference dichotomy.
For Butler then, identity is manufactured in and through the languages, concepts and ideas
available to a culture at a specific point in time, meaning that, following Foucault, there are
historical conditions that govern the emergence of such discourses, and these develop and
change over time, often in unexpected ways that are both breaches from, and continuations
of, the past. All identities are constituted within ambiguities, incoherences and
inconsistencies, but for the sake of coherence we are required to disavow, suppress or
reinscribe in order to perform as an intelligible and coherent self (Butler, Gender Trouble 3132; Psychic Life 27). The cultural demand to articulate identity as constant, fixed, coherent
and intelligible results in subjectivity being always dependent on belonging to a set of norms
regularly given as a range or distributional curve of normativities (Foucault, Security,
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Territory, Population 62). The cultural obligation for subject intelligibility and recognisability
is a contemporary, western necessity for social participation.
Butler’s theories of identity performativity point to the relational sociality that governs how
subjectivity and belonging are manufactured in ways that aim to present themselves as
coherent, intelligible and recognisable to others, although that has tended to give
precedence to the role played by other social formations and normativities that govern and
structure a subject’s interpellation. Although she returns to relationality in her later work on
ethics as well as to the operations of discursive and interpretative frames that govern how
we perceive selves, norms and others, there is room in her theoretical framework for greater
development of the ways in which subjects are constituted through belonging as members of
groups, communities and populations. Through her rejection of the more ‘pure’ cultural
constructionist model of identity, in which identity is overlaid on a foundation (the body, the
sexed body, the desiring body), Butler makes it clear that the subject is not constituted as a
cultural identity mapped onto a pre-discursive ‘I’ but in the structure of signification (Gender
Trouble 143) and in the citationally reiterative performances that produce, retroactively, the
illusion of an inner identitarian core. The inability of the subject to be totalised is to be
understood in the necessity of the repeated play of performance (‘Imitation’ 18). In the
analysis of subjectivity as it follows the precepts developed by Butler, the ways in which our
identities are articulated depends on the deep-seated attachments to discursively-given
norms of identity that inform the contemporary everyday mechanisms of belonging.
To belong to a population grouping is an element of performativity, however that population
is defined—whether national or through a localised perception of a category of subjects.
Belonging here is not the product of an identification, as if one is suddenly aware that one
belongs to a particular definition or category of population such as a national population, a
generation or even to a problematically-flattened sense of global population as nondifferentiated human subjects. Rather, belonging is produced through the performativity of
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such identities, identifications and affiliations over time in a manner which is never complete,
fully coherent or fully stabilised. That is, identification with those around us is complex and
not wholesale, but is played out through manufactured forms of belonging. One does not
belong to a national population because one is of that nationality; rather the assertion of that
national group produces nationality and a sense of mutual identification. Elspeth Probyn has
argued that belonging has an affective modality that plays out through a never-fulfilled
yearning for that very belonging (Outside Belongings). This is significant for populationderived identity, for it points to the fact that all performativity occurs in the context of
relationality: the production and articulation of recognisable identities (intelligible, coherent,
forged in belonging) depends on there being at one level the normativities that constitute
what is or should be a recognisable identity (and therefore a liveable life), and, at another
level, the presence of those who surveil the performance and ensure it meets criteria of
norms of relative similitude in order to belong. Belonging is not ontological, as Vikki Bell
points out, but operates at several levels of abstraction (3). A theory of performative identity
indicates that belonging is not the starting-point of identity because one does not, from the
beginning, automatically belong to a particular identity category, whether gender, ethnicity,
race or nationality, but performs in ways of coherence, intelligibility and recognisability in
order to fulfil that belonging. In that sense, performing the belonging to a population group
(which might be performing Australian-ness or German-ness through particular recognised
codes, norms, attitudes, behaviours, affiliations, ways of thinking or seeing and in contrast
with other ways of performing) precedes the identity category that is retroactively produced
through that performance of belonging. In bringing the element of belonging into focus, the
different configurations, definitions and interpretations of the concepts of population and
people(s) can be understood as one—among several—cultural and discursive elements to
which subjects have a deeply-felt sense of attachment such that subjectivity and identity is
dependent on that attachment and the relationship that are given meaning through the
concept of population.
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To Belong to a Nation
Nation-states are a site of considerable attachment for many subjects, and thus are
dominant in how identities are constituted at particular times. The nation-state requires the
development and management of a sense of common belonging in order for the historicallyrecent idea of the nation to proceed into an ongoing future (Taylor 45). In Benedict
Anderson’s framework, the imagined community of the nation is developed through certain
ritual practices to which subjects maintain particular attachments, and in many cases these
can be—as with many other types of community—symbols of belongingness put into wide
circulation, frequently within media practices operating within the public sphere (Cohen). In
the pre-enlightenment era, the foundations for national belonging were produced through the
condition that subjects have a felt sense of an individual, juridical and yet personal,
relationship with the figure of the sovereign king (Foucault, Society Must Be Defended 217).
In modernity, that relationship becomes one focused not on the figure of an ascendant
monarch or lord (who remains, nevertheless, symbolically significant in some regions as a
residue of the past), but the population of the state. In Foucault’s historical framework, it is
specifically the state’s role in administration of the nation—‘its ability to administer itself, to
manage, govern, and guarantee the constitution and workings of the figure of the State and
State power’ (Society Must Be Defended 223)—that is the site of attachment for subjects.
Today, such attachment to state power as an administrative form can be understood as
being mediated through certain civil rights and political participation (Habermas 20) which we
might say work for the nation partly as a management strategy and partly as the nationstate’s alibi.
In many ways, the attachment to the nation-state as the site of population belonging is one
which occurs through administration and governance of the state. Foucault pointed out that
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the function and historical role of the nation is not determined by a nation’s ability to conquer
other nations but its ability to manage and govern its population through state administration:
The nation is therefore no longer a partner in barbarous and
warlike relations of domination. The nation is the active,
constituent core of the State. The nation is the State, or at least an
outline State. It is the State insofar as it is being born, is being
shaped and is finding its historical conditions of existence in a
group of individuals (Society Must Be Defended 223).
Yet what constitutes belonging and identity in terms of that nation is more complex than
simply the existence of a group of individuals. The nation as a term is etymologically derived
from the term nascere meaning ‘to be born’ (Minca 393). Although national identity as one
mode of population belonging is, as I will show, always performative and constituted in the
repetition of forms of relationality that are conditioned by the de-limiting of the population to
one considered a ‘national population’, the figure of birth haunts definitions and concerns
over who belongs to which population, at what time and in what conditions (Cover). The
right to participate in the sovereign nation as a way of performing identity and population
membership is one which returns retroactively to birth as the primary norm of that belonging.
Birth is the alibi for such belonging, by which it is possible for a subject to turn to the claim to
birth in order to justify and give coherence to belonging to the nation as a particular and
highly limited form of population belonging.
Birth, likewise, becomes the justification for the exclusionary actions of the nation, whereby
one subject can argue that another does not belong to this population because that person
was not born here. Usually this is a mechanism to ensure the dominance of white
hegemony in particular western countries (McAllan 11-12), although it is lived in both
policy/administrative and disciplinary/everyday terms of embodied experience. The phrase
‘Go back to where you came from’ is effectively to say ‘go back to where you were born, and
those who came before you.’ Such a performative articulation that marks the one who was
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not born within the ‘lands’ of the nation as non-belonging or not-fully-belonging to the
population is, of course, another way in which national identity is produced as coherent, for
in identifying an ‘other’ to national belonging, one shores up one’s own belonging and,
hence, national identity. Migration, nevertheless, is the complexification of population since
the mid-twentieth century, and this complexifies national belonging. Governance of the
nation-state is central in this context, for it is the state which services ‘the matrix of the
obligations and prerogatives of citizenship. It is that which forms the conditions under which
we are juridically bound’ (Butler & Spivak 3). Administrative governance of populations
breaches the birth-nation-belonging continuum such that migration is uneasily permitted
when particular conditions that would tolerate a form of belonging are permitted. In many
ways, this can make more concrete a deep attachment for a migrant subject to a new nation
or state, although it can also breach the merger of the administrative and the everyday,
whereby a government might permit one to identify as a member of the nation (to become a
British subject, to become an Australian citizen) and yet not to fully belong (to be ‘on the
margins’), particularly if others in the local environment deny that belonging, denounce
migration as a pathway to national identity, or act to marginalise or differentiate that subject
from that national identity. The administrative element here is one which concerns itself with
spatial definitions of the nation, protecting borders from ‘unauthorised’ crossings and
enveloping the meaning of population in terms of territory and spatiality by linking these with
an idea of national character (Saxton 111-112). The crisis of nation as the determinant of
population is, of course, what is at stake in this example. But it remains that the formation
which determines belonging here in terms of national populations is the administration which
enacts particular (sovereign) decisions to permit citizenship, thus a form of belonging and
thus national identification.
The discourses that constitute the relationship between subjectivity and national population
belonging are not wholly those that circulate in governance, policy and administration—
despite the investment of governance in border policing, population statistics and
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normativities. Other levels of experience play a significant role in how belonging to a
population is produced and performed. Greg Noble has criticised approaches derived from
Anderson for an over-reliance on the idea of the nation as an ideational category
communicated in contemporary media. Noble indicates that public rituals of national
attachment are not the source of belonging to a national population, nor are there adequate
reasons given for why people choose to participate in such national events. Instead, he turns
to the everyday: ‘Our capacity to identify with the nation comes not simply from these events
per se, but from the somewhat submerged, half-conscious and ubiquitous experience of
nation throughout our everyday lives which makes those moments of national identification
possible’ (53). Analysing the everyday furnishing, décor and decorational choices made in
the private home by a range of people in Australia, Noble demonstrates the ways in which
the attachment to the nation occurs through submerged and non-voluntary decorational
choices, rather than through the ritual annual events of nationhood or the promotion of the
nation in media and other public discourse. Rightly, the sites of nationhood are not those
points of national ‘obviousness’. Likewise, the identification with national populations are not
driven by public national rituals, even though they are very often the site at which we find the
visual relationship of subjects. In my analysis here, the nation is that which constructs a
dominant use of the concept of population, meaning that relationality is figured through
nationhood, nationality and sometimes nationalism. In that context, then, to be a subject
means to be to some degree a national subject. A sense of nationality is thus constituted in
a manufactured belonging to a relational group and performed through various conformable
behaviours, expressions, articulations and attitudes, all of which peak and wane at various
times in everyday temporality. For example, the codes of nationhood in the furnished home
that Noble analyses, while submerged and ubiquitous, are very much consumed and
displayed to fulfil a national coherence and recognisability in order to achieve belonging.
This is not necessarily always conscious and voluntary, of course, but it is always about the
dominant relationality of performing one’s identity in the context of population—of belonging
to a population or group of people.
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Following Noble, then, it is in everyday relationality that subjects come to have an
attachment to—or with—a sense or understanding of population. However, what matters
here is how population itself is conceived by singular subjects and through what
mechanisms the notion of population becomes intelligible. Although affiliations and
identifications with nationality can occur at the level of the very personal, in thinking through
affiliation in populational terms it is through certain administrative and governance
communications as to how the population is conceived that it becomes intelligible to us, even
though we are not necessarily every day accessing demographic data or governmental
policies with a constructedness of language designed to inculcate a sense of nationality
through population numbers and make-up. It is because the notion of the population as a
mass of people in varying degrees of distinctiveness and similitude is difficult to conceive in
the practice of everyday life that we turn to what we know and have heard for the discourse
of population to be sensible to us in an everyday affiliational identification—in other words,
as that which provides a discursive node through which we perform an aspect or element of
subjective identity in relational and affiliational ways coherent to ourselves and others. What
we can see from the above relationship between administration’s implication in the
production of the nation-state and the everyday norms by which national identity is
performed is that belonging to a national population and articulating an identity that is
conformable with that population is an activity that occurs between governance and the
disciplinarity of the everyday.
Population, Belonging and Regulation
Belonging to population occurs, then, through particular ways and methods of performing
identity, and these are at one level always fictional (if meaningful and sometimes even
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ethical) and at another level always unstable: if identity is performative it is, as Butler has
argued, based on citing a discursively-given signifier (such as nationality) and repeating it
performatively, under conditions in which all repetition is always surreptitiously doomed to
failure by the very impossibility of genuine repetition. At yet another level, repeating the
norms of a population-based identity or affiliation occurs in the context of regulatory regimes
that demand the coherence of the identity and, indeed, that we perform identities at all
(Butler, Gender Trouble 141-142). Such regulatory regimes rely, as Foucault has shown, on
the two levels of disciplinarity and normative regulation through biopolitical governance.
Regulatory mechanisms that demand certain performances of relational identity in the
context of population concepts operate at the juncture between disciplinarity and the
regulatory mechanisms of biopolitics.
In his Society Must Be Defended lectures from 1975-76, Foucault used the example of the
‘model town’ of the nineteenth century to demonstrate the power relations produced through
the mutual activity of discipline and regulation. Disciplinary mechanisms that regulate bodies
operate by establishing visibilities and norms of behaviour at the local level, such as how
families are organised into homes and individuals into particular rooms or the policing and
control of public spaces in the town’s streets (which might include the use of those streets or
public spaces in non-normative hours such as at night). Subject to surveillance, alternatives
to the norms that operate through disciplinarity are, of course, deemed non-normal and thus
fail to be coherent performances of identities. (For example, the father-husband of a family
household who sleeps in the wrong part of the house demands explanation and response in
order for his identity to be coherent; sitting quietly in the town centre in the small hours
likewise defies intelligibility of subjecthood and demands an explanation in response—
perhaps literally—to the policing of the nexus between bodies and public spaces.) Foucault
points out, however, at the same time the town and its population are subject to a series of
regulatory mechanisms operating at the level of governance and biopolitics. In the
nineteenth century in Europe, these included encouragements to financial saving related to
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housing, the systems by which renting occurred, rules on hygiene to guarantee the longevity
of the population, the mechanisms by which the structural arrangements of the town have an
impact on sexuality, procreation and child care (Society Must Be Defended 250-251).
Although they do not necessarily operate with the same veracity of surveillance and policing
of corporeal life and everyday articulations as disciplinary mechanisms of power, these
regulatory mechanisms produce particular sets of norms through the collation of
information—often statistical—and the operation of power that focuses not on individual
bodies but on population groups as a whole by presenting the discursive structure for
normativities through popular similitude. The governance management of populations
produces norms that one is compelled to perform in order to be a coherent, intelligible and
recognisable subject; that is, in order to belong to that population. As Foucault put it: ‘The
norm is something that can be applied to both a body one wishes to discipline and a
population one wishes to regularize’ (Society Must Be Defended 254). In reading Foucault’s
perception of the biopolitics of population through Butler’s theories of performativity, identity
that is forged in relationality with populational norms is thus produced in the nexus between
discipline, biopolitical administration and regulatory governance of the self.
Within these conditions, whereby disciplinarity and governance merge to constitute the
relationship between population (in its dominant, nationalised form of definition) and identity
(as performative in the relationality between the subject and that definition of population),
there is an identifiable slippage between race, norm and conduct (Macey 196). To say this
is to point back to the problematic arrangements whereby discipline can play a constitutive
role in the conduct of ‘citizens’ as members of a population towards each other and towards
new arrivals who are not members by virtue of the ‘birth’ formation, and governance, through
which such movement from another place (of birth) has been authorised and by which the
activities of determining, counting, figuring and regulating the population at the national level
are managed. Between these mechanisms of power, belonging is forged and that belonging
to population is essential for everyday coherence and intelligibility, and thus results in a deep
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and strongly-felt attachment to the population. That attachment is, then, an attachment to
the self, to life and to liveability, for without it the work of fulfilling the persistent
Enlightenment demand for coherence and intelligibility is either impossible (for some) or
requires an exhausting and extensive form of identity work (for others).
Another way of thinking of the relationship between disciplinarity and administrative
governance as the means by which subjects come to be performed in relationality with
(national) population is in terms of how basic material needs are formulated at the point of
this relationship. The exchange of basic material needs is, from the very beginning,
articulated through particular prescriptions of a social bond (Butler, ‘Performative Agency’
159). Yet in ways which point to the corporeality of population belonging, material needs
such as the acquisition, provision and sharing of food, sanitation and the sewage systems
which take life-threatening wastes away, access to water, education and other facilities that
are necessary for a liveable life (in the west, at least) are both disciplinary and governmental.
At the administrative level, planning around population size and composition (for example,
age demographics, health infrastructure requirements, urbanism) is central to how these are
provided and maintained.
At the same time, however, there are corporeal disciplinary formations that are reproduced
in culture and that code conformable actions and behaviours in regard to how they are used.
These might include in some localities regularly affected by drought certain codes around
showering and not wasting water or, in other contexts, ways in which food is used,
consumed and refrigerated. Corporeal embodiment is manufactured also through the ways
in which we produce and dispose of bodily waste and human effluent. What is important
here is, of course, that the provision of these services is typically within neo-liberal
frameworks whereby some are commodities for exchange through the market, others are
governmentally provided but none are distributed equally and evenly, only within particular
governance limitations of minimums for an overall national population. All, however, are
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expectations—a shortfall in the provision of sanitation or schooling will be spoken of publicly
(if not in policy) in terms of rights as citizens or rights as members of the population. The
social bonds which are played out in the everyday experience of food consumption, use of
sanitation, and access to schooling, among others, provide a sense of relationality between
subjects and populations as the group who (nationally, in many senses) utilise these
facilities. Moreover, subjectivity is conditioned by that social bond of those who use and
share such facilities. However, everyday activities such as food consumption are not only
national, despite the existence of national food tastes or, even, cosmopolitan food tastes in
countries such as Australia where food consumption is marked by its multicultural policies
(as one of the few ways in which multicultural pluralism actually plays out there). Food
production and consumption, as Elspeth Probyn has pointed out, is an area by which the
global inserts itself into the intimate and emotional lives of subjects (‘Swimming with Tuna’
99). Nevertheless, the ways in which food and other basic sustenance provisions and
services arrive and are consumed is strongly conditioned by the national, and it is in the
shared use of these that membership of a population is performed as a relational everyday
activity.
Conclusion
One has a deep sense of belonging to population as the site which represents norms and
commonalities among a mass group not so much because (national) regulatory technologies
of power subordinate subjects into submitting to identities which are defined through a
belong-ness to (national) populations, but because subjects form a passionate attachment in
dependency on the population as the definer of normative identity coherence. As I have
remarked, the nation is not the wholesale definer of the co-ordinates of identity for singular
subjects at all times—rather there are both peaked moments at which belonging to a
national population matters most, and there are tacit and everyday experiences which
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express that belonging as Greg Noble has shown. Yet because of the force of the
connection between nation and population, and because our identities are only meaningful
in relationality to population in some form or other, it is the nation to which one is primarily
perceived to belong. Attachment, however, is necessary for given any choice between an
identity that is based on conforming to normativities that are policed through regulatory
regimes, and having no identity by failing to articulate the self through recognisable,
intelligible and coherent norms, national identity will prevail. This is so, even if the extent of
that attachment will always and for every subject be variable, complex, interwoven with other
co-ordinates of identity from gender to ethnicity to age to regional location to categories of
career choices, and will often be in conflict with other, deeply-felt attachments. This is one
form in which the relationship between identity and belonging is manufactured in the
contemporary era.
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