Being nominally in a society does not mean being of it

Evidence

Nevertheless, as Michael Hanchard has pointed out, people can be in a civil society but not of it. They may belong in some nominal or instrumental sense to – be thus claimed by – a society but at best ambivalently, anxiously, devoured as a food too rich or poisoned for the body politic that then sits uneasily, wrenchingly, in society’s stomach. Increasingly, as alienation from the state’s civil society has spread and deepened, one antidote for growing numbers of the disaffected in this globalizing age and technological facility has been to identify with what Alejandro Colás calls “international civil society” or John Keane “the rise of global civil society.” This offers at least a virtual counter-space of action critical of the political reification of the local, on the one hand, effected through the limiting horizons of state formation, identification, and insistence, and of the global, on the other, effected through multinational alliances and actions, state and corporate. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 289

Categorization

• XREF: The being-in-but-not-of framing connects outward to other writing about belonging without membership, and to Goldberg’s recurring theme of the dead rendered living. — connects to: Human home is a meaning-centered sense of mastery and belonging, not a physical place. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 26; Mass consent does not make a society rational, only repressive — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 93
• QUESTION: Hanchard’s specific source — which of his works is this claim developed in? Worth chasing the origin of the phrase.