Turning the state inside out? Exploring 'left governmentality', participatory-democratic governance, and the transformation of deflated consciousness

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Policies change people's lives, but they also change people. Despite their rhetoric of 'choice' and limited state intervention, Conservative party strategy has been shaped by this insight. As Margaret Thatcher put it: 'Economics are the method: the object is to change the heart and soul'. From Right-to-Buy, to performance-related-pay, to WorkFare, policies have been used to change peoples' material circumstances and experiences, and thereby influence their priorities, behaviours, and identities.Michel Foucault's concept of 'governmentality' is helpful to describe this process. Whilst states have the power to compel citizens, governmentality describes a subtler power, involving the construction of willing consent. Through policies, practices and other 'techniques of governance', the state encourages subjectivities - ways to understand oneself and one's agency in the world - which support its desired ends (2007). A significant body of research now shows how neoliberal state policies and other governance techniques have resulted in atomised populations, with a 'deflated' form of consciousness and limited sense of collective identity or agency (Hall, 2017; Brown, 2015). As Jeremy Gilbert (2014) has argued, this has had disastrous consequences for our ability to address the multiple crises facing society. Citizens are left without the skills or proclivities to form diverse collective agents necessary for a functioning democracy, nor the ability to collaborate to harness collective intelligence and creativity. This underlies a powerful sense of political impotence, which manifests as resigned 'disaffected consent' to the status quo, however undesirable it may be.My research vision is to contribute to overcoming this problem, through exploring how state policies and processes can be used to reverse the atomising and disempowering effects of neoliberalism, enabling new subjectivities which afford greater individual and collective agency. Specifically, I will explore thelimits and the potential of participatory-democracy as a tool to transform citizen consciousness. This will make a key contribution to the emerging agenda, 'left governmentality'. Inspired by the problems of the Syriza government in Greece, scholars have argued we need to explore what a non neoliberal, 'left governmentality' would look like (Gourgouris, 2018; Karitzis, 2017). A common idea in these accounts is the supposed desirability of participatory-democracy. Assumed are its transformative effects on citizens. Indeed, proponents of participatory-democracy often claim such wider effects as community cohesion, empathy, and raised confidence (Local Government Association, 2018). However, we actually know very little about how participation in governance interacts with processes of subject-formation: most research has explored different kinds of questions (Norval, 2007). Where this is thefocus, there is evidence of divergent effects. Sometimes, it appears to foster individual and collective agency, the idealised 'citizen-agent'; other times, apathy and disempowerment (Montambeault, 2016). In the longer term, I will research selected government initiatives, using ethnographic observation, depth interviews and surveys, to explore how participation influences citizen subjectivities. The ESRC fellowship will provide the vital stepping stone to this. During the fellowship I will:i) transform two papers into published articles, building my track-record in relevant and underdeveloped areas (including the physical, affective dimension to deliberative democracy (c.f. Machin, 2015) and the relationship between 'constituent power' and discourse);ii) conduct new research to enable me to scope out case studies and publish on this subject, establishing its scholarly merit;iii) undertake quantitative training;iv) publish online and present at conferences, to build networks for future collaboration and promote this agenda;v) develop applications to fund this research.