On working relations with the citizen

Abstract

Why do people resist acting upon climate change? The article approaches this muchdebated question through a study of the failed attempt to implement congestion charging in Tromsø, Norway. Taking this event as its starting-point, the article sets out to examine how climate change is rendered governable and how this in turn affords the citizen rather limited political agency. Arguing that this in itself created resistance towards the congestion charging scheme, the article moves to look at how a specific object sought governed through -the car -can inform ideas of the citizen and its agentic capacities. It is here argued that whilst the concept of relational agency has sensitized political analysis towards the doings of non-human entities, the orientation towards symmetrical accounts of agency has also left more or less unexplored what it is that constitutes the subject. There is, I thus suggest, a need to distinguish between symmetry and sameness and, further, to find ways of teasing out difference that does not simultaneously re/produce asymmetries. Approaching this by way of object multiplicity and affordances, the article concludes with a discussion of how subjectivities can be understood as a 'gathering' of relations and encounters that constantly re-enact the subject. Arguing that this represents a form of 'compression' through which potentials of 'the subject multiple' are made more proximate and thus also concentrated, the article suggests that rather than to work through perceived mechanisms of the subject, authorities should instead work with it.