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Overview
Robert Asen explores the ways in which images of the poor functioned in policy debates to advantage some positions and disadvantage others. Visions of Poverty demonstrates that any future policy agenda must first come to terms with the vivid, disabling images of poverty that continue to circulate. In debating reforms, participants -- whose ranks should include potential recipients -- need to imagine poor people anew.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780870138874 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Michigan State University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2012 |
| Series: | Rhetoric & Public Affairs |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 530 KB |
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Read an Excerpt
Visions of Poverty
Welfare Policy and Political Imagination
By Robert Asen
Michigan State University Press
Copyright © 2002 Robert AsenAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87013-887-4
CHAPTER 1
Imagining Others in Public Policy Debate
The 1962 publication of Michael Harrington's The Other America helped focus the gaze of the nation on a problem it had overlooked as many Americans experienced unprecedented affluence amidst a post-World War 11 economic boom—the impoverished condition of many of its citizens. In the 1950s and early 1960s, between forty and fifty million people lived in an other America that maimed body and spirit. They lived with hunger and without adequate housing, education, and medical care. Harrington sought to open the eyes of his readers. He worried that "American society is creating a new kind of blindness about poverty. The poor are increasingly slipping out of the very experience and consciousness of the nation." Harrington's book signaled a modern paradox of seeing the poor. From the end of the Great Depression to the beginnings of a War on Poverty in the mid-1960s, large numbers of poor people lived in relative invisibility at the margins of public debate. Harrington's book contributed to a rediscovery of poverty that brought poor people into view where they have obtained, at times, an almost hyper-visibility. Yet this visibility has not been entirely uplifting. Visibility may have enabled the undoing of programs originally implemented to combat poverty. As poor people have become objects of intense public scrutiny, visibility has called attention to their supposedly baneful attitudes and behaviors. Our current vision has constricted along these lines as policymakers have dismantled federal structures and rescinded past promises in a decisive reorientation of social policy since the 1960s.
Seeing is more than the perception of objects with the eyes. Sometimes it does not involve this kind of sensory perception at all. Seeing engages the imagination. It proceeds in this manner through the construction of mental images and impressions. This mode of seeing invokes the polysemous quality of seeing as understanding, cognizance, acceptance, knowledge, experience, and heedfulness. Expressions such as "I see your point" and questions like "Why can't you see what's happening here?" denote these meanings. Harrington recognized these qualities in this mode of seeing. Referring to the increasing invisibility of the millions of poor people in the United States, he exhorted that "[h]ere is a great mass of people, yet it takes an effort of the intellect and will even to see them." Not sense perception alone, but the coordinated faculties of the intellect and will bring the poor into view.
However difficult, seeing others in this way is especially important for social and political action. As Elaine Scarry explains, "the way we act toward 'others' is shaped by the way we imagine them." Imagining entails individual and collective effort, as Scarry's use of the plural pronoun implies. Collective imagining is intrinsic to social orders; it bears directly on a society's self-understanding. Benedict Anderson has traced how imagining lies at the heart of the idea of nationhood. He explains that the nation "is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion." Imagining one's relationship to others also occurs in face-to-face interactions among members of a political community: the physical presence of another does not displace images. Moreover, just as members of a political community may imagine their shared belonging with one another, they may imagine others in their midst as internal exiles—people who have abdicated conditions of membership. Citizens and their elected representatives often imagine this relationship when they consider the residents of the other America.
The collectivity invoked in collective imagining and its connection to social understanding indicate that collective imagining does not principally or even necessarily address visual artifacts. Rather, collective imagining signals an activation of the capacity of discourse to envision others. Collective imagining may not be discerned by aggregating the products of individuals' imagination. It emerges instead through social dialogue as people in their everyday lives encounter others in contexts of varying structure, scope, and formality. And the role of discourse in these encounters is not limited to the transmission of information. Discourse is productive; it constructs our images of others.
Processes of discursive construction may be most active in public debates and controversy. At these times the collective imagination, which often serves as a diffused background of shared assumptions, values, perceptions, and beliefs for matters identified explicitly as topics of discussion, becomes unsettled. Public debates often prompt collective reflection about previously held commitments and affiliations. In such moments, advocates often call upon their auditors to rethink relations to one another. Hoping to inspire such rethinking, Harrington highlighted the intimate connection between public debate and seeing the poor. Concession and compromise among elected officials could not envision an inclusive national community. He held out no hope for the abolition of poverty without "a new period of political creativity." He explained that "[w]hat is needed if poverty is to be abolished is a return of political debate, a restructuring of the party system so that there can be clear choices, a new mood of social idealism." Harrington believed that debate was crucial for the formation of a collective will necessary to enact a creative vision. He asserted that only collective will—and not individual acts of altruism alone—would alleviate poverty in the United States. Of course, enacting any vision is not an uncomplicated process. Contestation accompanies processes of discursive construction. Advocates have to sustain their visions against competing versions as they engage interlocutors. Through public debate and controversy, collective imagining itself is continually refashioned.
This book examines collective imagining about poverty and the poor in the institutional forums of public policy debate. Members of a political community come together through public policy debate to formalize agreed-upon rights, responsibilities, and obligations; debate also presents an opportunity for new understandings of these areas to emerge. In public policy and other forums, the modern paradox of seeing the poor has been evident. The vision of debate participants has narrowed considerably. In the mid-1960s, participants declared unconditional war on poverty, recognizing poverty as a multifarious phenomenon affecting diverse types of people. In the 1980s and 1990s, participants renounced federal interventions, viewing poverty as "dependence" on government public assistance —"welfare"—programs by a black, urban "underclass." A policy trajectory that ended in the repeal of the principal government public assistance program providing monetary assistance to poor families, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDc), developed contemporaneously with this narrowed vision. This repeal trajectory began in the early-1980s with budget reductions in AFDC and other programs. It proceeded in the mid-1980s with a reorientation of AFDC that placed new demands on adult recipients. This trajectory culminated in the 1990S with legislation that repealed the AFDC program. Together, this narrowed vision and repeal trajectory constituted a retrenchment era in welfare policy discourse.
Retrenchment was one of four eras that make up the larger history of AFDC. The program developed successively through periods of enactment, early operation, expansion, and retrenchment. Title m of the 1935 Social Security Act (ssa)-the Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) program, which was renamed Aid to Families with Dependent Children in 1962-in effect federalized mothers' pension laws that had been enacted by forty-five states. The Committee on Economic Security (CES), President Roosevelt, and the Children's Bureau all viewed ADC as a noncontroversial component of the SSA. In its report to the president, the CES recommended that ADC families "should be differentiated from the permanent dependents and unemployables." Suspicious of "relief," FDR did not regard ADC mothers as relief recipients because he did not view them as part of the potential paid labor force. The program avoided controversy in its early operation between i936 and 1960 because local administrators decided to exclude from the rolls potentially eligible cases that may have drawn the ire of local constituencies. Writing in 1939, Jane Hoey, director of the Bureau of Public Assistance, complained that many of the local administrators applied rigid character tests for granting aid "on a basis of 'promoting' the 'nice' families." She reported that only 2 percent of children receiving ADC lived with an unmarried mother. Racial discrimination also limited distribution of aid. In the South, ADC coverage by county decreased as the percentage of black residents increased. Nationwide, the average payment per child by county decreased as the percentage of black residents increased. Yet events during this era presaged future conflict as amendments to the ssA in the 1940S and 1950S altered the composition of the ADC caseload by making greater numbers of "worthy widows" eligible for social insurance programs.
Between the mid-1960s and mid-1970S, AFDC expanded dramatically and public hostility toward the program emerged. Governmental, community, and judiciary forces combined to prompt a large increase in the percentage of families that applied for public assistance through the 1960s. The most telling statistic of the decade concerned the sharp rise in the number of eligible families who actually were assisted. In the early 1960s, 33 percent of eligible families participated in AFDC; in 1971, 9o percent participated. At the same time, aFDC came under increasing scrutiny as a flawed program. State and local governments engaged in highly publicized efforts throughout the 1960s to reduce AFDC caseloads. In 1969 President Nixon proposed a Family Assistance Plan (FnP) that embodied these divergent tendencies. His speech introducing the FAP rebuked AFDC as a program corrupted by the increased power of the federal government. Yet his solution in effect would have established a national minimum income guarantee. Though benefit levels dropped by 30 percent in inflation-adjusted figures through the 1970s, retrenchment commenced in earnest in 1981 as Ronald Reagan and his supporters sought to reduce federal spending by removing reputedly non-needy recipients from the AFDC rolls. In the following chapters, I present an overview of the eras preceding retrenchment and trace the policy debates of the retrenchment era and the images of the poor that circulated therein. In so doing, I tell the story of how the least controversial component of the 1935 Social Security Act became the only component to be repealed.
Imagining, Controversy, and Tensions of Representation
The repeal of AFDC transpired in the imagining of policymakers as much as in the votes legislators cast on the House and Senate floors. Affirmative votes in these two chambers would not have been recorded without significant shifts in processes of collective imagining. In light of its import, imagining in its multiple meanings as mental faculty, social force, and representational process merits closer scrutiny. In a quotidian and fundamental meaning, imagining denotes forming mental images and impressions or conceiving or pondering matters, as in a faculty of the mind. Although conceiving or pondering often operate jointly with perception, imagining as a mental faculty also focuses on things not present to the senses. On this functional understanding, imagining appears as the method by which most Americans come to know their poorer compatriots. Americans increasingly live and work in economically segregated settings. The daily lives of middle- and upper-class Americans place them less frequently in any significant contact with the poor. Importantly, imagining, as a method of coming to know others, is not an idle, inconsequential activity. Its consequence emerges in other meanings of the word. Imagining engages a creative energy. If imagining can conceive of things that are not present to one's senses but perhaps existing elsewhere, then it also invokes actions or events not yet in existence. Imagining looks beyond the bounds of the existing and the limits of the established order to create and consider that which is not yet. Moreover, the energy of imagining engenders an expectation: that which is created in one's imagination is anticipated, viewed as likely to come into existence.
These additional meanings reveal that imagining and the imagination may act as a social force. In this way, imagining is a productive act with consequences for imaginers and others subjected to their imagination. Some commentators, such as anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, see the manifest force of the imagination as a positive, recent development. He maintains that "there is a peculiar new force to the imagination in social life today." Appadurai attributes its newfound power to the exposure of more and more of the world's population to global media channels. He believes that as a result people who live even the most dreary of everyday lives may regard their present circumstances not as an inevitability, but as a compromise between imaginative play and existing opportunity. That is, such individuals may live their lives significantly in the imaginative space that emerges between circulating media images of glamorous lifestyles of pleasurable consumption and the constraints imposed on them by their subordinate socioeconomic status. Retrenchment-era welfare policy debates suggest an ominous alternative role for the imagination: imaginative "play" may disempower some people by representing them through disabling images. Imagining may be a means by which established interests sustain and perhaps even strengthen their positions of privilege.
This ideological use of the imagination has functioned crucially in constructing and maintaining dividing lines over social justice in the U.S. welfare state. The 1935 Social Security Act bifurcated social welfare into public assistance and social insurance programs. Public assistance programs occupy an inferior position in the U.S. welfare state in comparison to social insurance programs. Public assistance programs are federal-state programs administered almost completely by state governments. They disperse meager grants that vary in each state and some localities, do not keep pace with inflation, and require satisfaction of corollary conditions. Social insurance programs are administered by the federal government and distribute generous grants that maintain uniformity across geography, index to inflation, and require no further actions from recipients. Recipients of social insurance-"social security"-have been portrayed as independent citizen-workers rightfully claiming money earned. In contrast, public assistance recipients have been depicted as clients benefiting from public charity. Performing their ideological function, these contrasting images occlude the similarities between social insurance and public assistance. The practice of social insurance belies its honorific contributory status. Retirees receive benefits out of proportion to their contributions. Money paid by current workers is not held in millions of separate accounts but used as general revenues. Moreover, whole classes of workers have been excluded from social security since its inception.
Imagining as a social force indicates that its creative energy is not coextensive with our social world generally, with what some theorists have referred to as the "social construction of reality." Imagining may participate in constructing our shared social world, but it is not the only participant. In this way, Charles Taylor situates the collective imagination as a mediator between the realm of social habit and that of explicitly articulated ideas, doctrines, and ideologies. To advance this distinction, however, is not to insist that imagining cannot order our shared social world. This is precisely the role ascribed to the imagination by political philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis. He holds that some imagined notions—he references such concepts as the "citizen," "justice," "money," and others-serve a central role in structuring societies. Collective understandings of these intertwined central notions order relationships among the people and objects through which they are represented. People and objects, in turn, make these notions tangible. The controversial history of welfare reform suggests that "welfare" often functions in this manner. Our collective understanding of welfare informs relations among potential recipients, proposed programs, prospective administrative agencies, and, often in the guise of the financier, the general public. These people and objects, in turn, represent welfare as a material practice. However, these valuable formulations of the imagination as a structuring force risk circumscribing a passive, background role for imagining: imagining in this mode exists in the background of public debate at a level below that of explicit argumentation. Imagining as a social force, though it often establishes an implicit context for topics identified as "public issues," may operate actively, especially in those historical moments when imaginings shift.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Visions of Poverty by Robert Asen. Copyright © 2002 Robert Asen. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
RHETORIC AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS SERIES,Title Page,
Copyright Page,
Dedication,
Acknowledgements,
CHAPTER 1 - Imagining Others in Public Policy Debate,
CHAPTER 2 - Cross-Purposes and Divided Populations: The Historical ...,
CHAPTER 3 - Reducing Welfare,
CHAPTER 4 - Reorienting Welfare,
CHAPTER 5 - Repealing Welfare,
CHAPTER 6 - Imagining an Inclusive Political Community,
Notes,
Bibliography,