“The self is to be a subjective being, it is to aspire to autonomy, it is to strive for personal fulfillment in its earthly life, it is to interpret its reality and destiny as a matter of individual responsibility, it is to find meaning in existence by shaping its life through acts of choice. These ways of thinking about humans as selves, and these ways of judging them, are linked to certain ways of acting upon such selves.” (Nickolas Rose. 1996. Governing Enterprising Individuals. In Inventing Ourselves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood. Pp. 151. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.)
“First, so-called welfare dependency, alcoholism, and teen pregnancy are pathologized and criminalized alongside violence, child abuse, and illegal drug use. This move is accomplished by relating the “low self-esteem” of welfare recipients, for example to their failure to act politically, to participate in their own empowerment, to engage in fulfilling the social obligation of “responsible citizenship.” (Barbara Cruikshank. 1999. Revolutions Within: Self-Government and Self-Esteem. In The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects. Pp. 95. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.)
In a recent Democratic Presidential debate, Senator Biden was asked to comment on the AIDS epidemic affecting the African-American community in the U.S. In his response, he attests to an understanding of individual responsibility (that is oh, so popular in political rhetoric) and the means of ‘governing enterprising individuals'. Advocating individual action to combat the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the African-American community ("it is manly to get tested" and "women can say no"), Senator Biden essentially promotes a rhetoric of 'self-esteem': the good citizen has agency to act in a meaningful way and if they do not engage in “responsible citizenship” than this is (mostly likely) due to their lack of self-esteem. In response to the 'self-esteem' movement, Cruikshank argues in the chapter "Revolutions Within: Self-Government and Self-Esteem" that analyzing the 'citizenship' of an individual by their ability to "self-rule" fails to grasp how that "citizen is (like inequality, poverty, and racism) the product of power relations" (Cruikshank 1999:103).
In Senator Biden's remarks, we see him essentially limiting the debate to the level of the individual without taking into account the power relations that act on and through the individual. Combating the AIDS epidemic requires more than testing and "saying no", it requires first an awareness of how the discourse constrains the agency of the individual and second an understanding of the consequences of maintaining the present discourse. In other words, proposing lack of self-esteem as a cause of the AIDS epidemic misconstrues the subjectivity of the individual.
