The Personal is Political. The Political is Personal.

 

 

Quarantine theory - I

Why not begin with Judith Butler?

And with Butler, why not with Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2018)?

But once begun, where to begin?  On Notes, what notes to note?

Pandemic brain

Notes is not necessarily an easy book to comment on, in the present moment.  It's not an easy book to skim.  It's not an easy book to "think about," by the yardstick of the current, pandemic moment.  Today, our thinking goes through stages where it's either parceled, panic-stricken, exploded, and scattershot, or else hungry, exhausted, over-focussed and obsessed with total doom, but either way necessarily half-attentive and short form. 

So like normal life, but more isolated and on stilts?  Kinda sorta.

On the other hand, interludes of solitude and uncanny, internal quiet can also open up nowadays.  If one can dredge up the strength or motivation to push into and beyond over-focussing mode, a brain of the moment can sink below the level of a superficial skim across the surface of pages, and then get caught up in Notes' conceptual flows and swirls.  That field can then become hard to pull out of.  

As a result, any notes on Notes can become much too lengthy and intricate.  As here. At the risk of loosing more words on the world that has too many already.

Looking around, and up

One could call Notes a fresh breeze of optimism. or curiosity, hope, and discovery.  It reinforces our awareness of the depths of the abyss from which we're looking up.  It's born of an era that feels like eons ago.

Some of Notes is spun out from Butler's 2011 rock star reception at Bryn Mawr during the Flexner Lectures. The reader can feel the infusion of her engagement with the passion and exploratory energy of the students and activists there, of the myriad causes in the air.  In such an atmosphere, does a philosopher wonder anew how can theory possibly stay relevant to all that's going on in the world?  The book bears that kind of stamp.

Yes, sometimes Notes amounts to something like "Watching the Global News with Judith Butler."  Realizations and conceptual connections percolate quickly.  The risk of setting them to paper is that one's live-time epiphanies about events in the world can become commonplaces quickly, then appear obvious in retrospect.

But so what?

Do we not sometimes have a moral duty to state the obvious?   Or, as Butler would put it, especially "to stress the obvious under conditions in which the obvious is vanishing"? 

Moreover, to state the obvious in somewhat convoluted terms forces us to struggle a bit to prise it out.  Maybe we'll view the commonplace with fresh eyes after we do.

Maybe everyone should "go back to college" thirty five years later, if they make it that long. What's wrong along the way with some reciprocal instruction, with a return to rehearsal of some basics and past lessons, enunciated to those who may be learning them for the first time (as on some level we all are, really)?  

What's wrong with reinventing the wheel?  The wheel, once invented, in retrospect becomes an obviousness.  But each generation or era must reinvent it regardless:  the wooden wagon wheel; the cast steel, flanged railroad wheel; the click wheel once borne by an Apple product that is now a crossword puzzle answer.  You can't create the later, improved versions if you forget or disregard the earlier versions, or if your education fails to teach about them and why they succeeded or failed.

When words fail

Yes yes, one may reply, but then again, what is there to say about it all?  What words are worth the breath of commentary about commentary?  

JB might say:  What indeed to say?  First sometimes to admit when there is "no good vocabulary" in the first place for certain things.  Then to use that awareness to take a closer look at the norms that determine thinkability.  And we're off to the Butlerian races.

Norms, after all, are like the police: Often absent, but when present, fallible. And who are the police?  Not only those in uniforms.  As Butler might put it, the cops include anyone who presumes to do the violence of insistence on criminalization or pathologizing of the nonnormative appearance.   You can tell is you're a cop by waiting to see if the police come after YOU for playing a cop.

When might there be "no good vocabulary"? Sometimes you know that you're talking about something that really exists, but you can only use the language you currently have to try to get at it, even at the risk of transforming the thing through use of that very language.  

Still harder is it when you are trying to keep in play threads of arguments that are difficult to think together or in relation. How can we hold onto a term that in fact contains two terms which repel each other, working in different directions?  We can do it by negotiating the tension. Sometimes, says JB, you have to  "cultivate the antagonisms"

Or she'd advise you to admit it when you are reaching the limits of existing language's technical vocabulary, to depict your project and its focus.

When all words fail, shutting up is a speech act too.

Terminator X speaks with his hands

Therefore, the next move in the protocol is "Act first, talk later"?  Or ". . . name it later"? This realm and the questions it raises are of interest to JB here.

Do we have a power first, then act?  No, sometimes you act first.  We both live to act AND act politically to secure the conditions / supports to live.

What if the enactment begins before there is any "I" to act?  That's how gender works. You could say that she wrote the book on it, or even invented a wheel, which is now an obviousness.  It's likewise how speech works.  We learn to speak by having the speech of others act upon us.

When we are told that we are passive bearers of a mark, it's usually the actual case that we are being asked or forced to enact something performatively, and reproduce or pass along that something, through the power of our performance.

Contrarily, acting like who we are is often a way of ontologically establishing who we are, or at least rethinking the ontology of the categories that we (or others?) think applicable.

What if, in this work, I am not as infallibly knowing about myself as I claim to be? If I am not, it is probably because outside or preexisting discourse has sneaked into my thought, doing work and having effects that I am not fully grasping.

Such categorical language often has an inchoate phase and is only later to become fixed.   For example, this happens when we are called names that purport to tell us who we "are" and how we are regarded, names which we initially do not even know or understand.  Hopefully we in time arrive at our own names for who we are.  Or we can at least hope to make for ourselves space to live in the "interstices among all names."

Can't spell "a priori" correctly unless the "I" comes last

"Choice" here arrives late in the performativity process.  Will we succeed in making our own lives liveable?  It may depend on the efficacy of the performance.

To represent yourself is not the same as to determine yourself, "not quite," anyway, according to Butler here.  Though performative action is part of that process.

So a public assembly's "speech" may be silence, ironic humor, mockery or derailment of language from its usual ends.  The utterance of the word "we" may very well come last.  In fact, it's instructive, once a "we" is claimed, to read it backwards ("we" backwards = "ew"?), to work in reverse to find who those claimers are or claim to be.  You'll probably find surprising things.

When bodies come together in an unregulated way, as a public assembly, their very coming together has an expressive function, even if no words are uttered.  (As in certain "minimalist" choreography? JB in her book a few years earlier described dance as "that moment when bodies come alive in a rule-bound way, but without precisely conforming to any law." Did Butler catch any dance at Bryn Mawr?  They have a good program. Maybe it inspired her.)

Do words equal thought, and thought equals movement?  Or vice-versa somehow?  In any case, JB might advise, look not necessarily to the meaning of a word or the identity it purports to designate.  Look rather to the zone that the term sets up, and the movement of thought that it generates.

Because sometimes, if speech can say one thing and the body another, remember that all verbal speech needs a body before it even happen in the first place.  

And if you have bodies, JB might continue, you have vulnerability.  However vulnerability is less like injurability, and more like receptivity.  It's also a state of precarity which pre-exists the inauguration of any transactional regime which says "don't hurt me and I won't hurt you."  The opposite of vulnerability is not "strength," but something that looks more like "solidarity": a purposive, acknowledged, concerted and performative interdependency.

We're sailing into some befuddling waters here.  Butler's train of thought in Notes is very heterodox, compared to our current moment's narrowing ability to imagine a relation with others, other than as a contract or a "deal," and if not those, then brute force.  

More interesting to JB is to wonder: Are not some obligations PRE-contractual?  Must it not be fruitful to identify the ground on which a contract would be mutually possible at all?  Is not that ground bound up with living processes that transcend my personal boundaries, on which the latter are dependent, within which I share with others a vulnerability?  Vulnerability then is a kind of relationality, a coalition in the making.

So it must be, JB suggests.  The individual "I," itself, is already not an identity.  It is an aspiration, an alliance, an assemblage of what we might call automatically precarious minorities (with precarity as a condition, never an identity).  These cohabitate. 

To say that something is an assembly means for Butler that something is composite and, it seems, on some levels necessarily constituted from antagonisms.  The "I" though is a weird one, because it has self-consciousness.  It's a self that watches itself, is watched by the world, watches how the world watches it, measures the distance between the two representations, and reacts.  

Put another way, how much "unequal value," separates the me that I reflect back to myself, and the me that the world reflects back to me? To obsess about that inequality is to engage in a cycle of critique and self-critique. It is to use our tendency to be self-referential to notice how my individuality is traversed by social forms that did not originate with me, without which I am unthinkable, and to use my ego against itself.

Can theory avert madness?

In Notes, Butler's prose, like her ideas there, is always mobile and rarely feels settled, fixed or stable.  However, the overall effect can be strangely reassuring.  It's like the burbling of a lid on top of a pot of gently roiling soup.  The murmur never falls quiet or stands still but also never explodes like a pressure cooker or shouts.  It can be meditative in a sometimes hypnotic way.  

The book's style can often deflect the reader's attentiveness.  The reader may find it easy to get to the end of a page or paragraph and ask, "What did I just read?  Where did my mind go?  My attention wandered. Did we change topics? How did we get from there to here?"  Our attentiveness is already destroyed enough, in times like these.

We may further ask, "My reader's mind drifted because Butler seemed to be lapsing into a string of basic banalities. I lapsed into autopilot mode.  However, she's taken these prosaisms in a direction that now results in what looks more like a mind-expanding profundity or a subversively understated, potentially explosive claim.  How did we get here?  I feel convinced, I agree, but intellectually I am not yet sure with what."  At such moments, you'll want to backtrack, piece apart Butler's sentences, then reassemble them to consider their meaning or implications in more linear form.    

So the reader can motor along, and alternate between the lanes of being lulled into zoned-outedness then prodded into mindfulness.  Our reading mind avoids the extremes on either side, the respective side ditches of narcotized somnolence and anxiety or panic.  This turns out to be fine reading for a pandemic.  Or to stave off a nervous breakdown. (And if Butler personally has never visited such fraught territory, which, if she had, we'll wager would have been in her younger years, then her prose suggests that she knows and has cared about at least one somebody who has.) 

Appropriately, Notes at a few junctures offers little answers to the question:  What can make a person go mad?

A one word answer might be: contradictions.  Particularly those which somebody is entrapped to face alone, which they can neither describe nor escape, or which entail a basic threat to the liveability of their life.

One scenario:  When under neoliberal rationality, we "become economically self-sufficient under conditions that undermine all prospects of self-sufficiency, then we are confronted by a contradiction that can easily drive one mad." (from the Introduction.) When sociopolitical forces push us to do and become what we are simultaneously blocked from, or where necessary, material preconditions are made systematically impossible to attain, then one's failure can become proof of one's socially dispensability. And that's potentially maddening.

Or, restated later: "In other words, no one person suffers a lack of shelter without there being a social failure . . . This initiates the possibility of taking apart that individualizing and maddening form of responsibility in favor of an ethos of solidarity." (later in the Introduction.)

Or later, when we're dashed on the reefs of thinkability: "The conceit of this form of recognition founders on itself . . . Which humans count as the human? . . . On the one hand, this is a clear contradiction . . . This is the kind of thinking that drives people mad, and that seems right.  One has to use reasonable language in the wrong way, and even commit errors of logic in order precisely to bring out this rupture induced by norms of recognition." (Chapter 1)

Here, contradictions and impossible double binds follow automatically from certain norms.  To ask no critical questions about those norms is to ask to have your mind torn apart.

Or again, when heading towards a post-colonial context: "If one is tied to another against one's will, even when, precisely when, a contract is the means of subjugation, the tie can be quite literally maddening, a form of unacceptably enforced dependency, as happens in slave labor and other forms of coercive contract. The problem is not dependency as such, but its tactical exploitation." (Chapter 4)

Finally, heading in yet another, more hopeful direction: When faced with the possibility of loss at any given moment, or with the absence of any feeling of ontological predictability whatsoever, our vulnerability can indeed lead to madness, misery or hatred, but in other conjunctures to a "felicitous" outcome, for example to sudden friendship, passion or love.  (also Chapter 4)

So does our inescapable, contradictory impasse lead to a breakdown or a to a breakthrough, to turn the corny phrase?  Notes' underlying ethos is more interested in exploring the latter.

Do I contradict myself?

A motivation running throughout Notes might be said to be "thinking through contradiction." A public assembly itself is one of these.  

We are told at the outset that democratic theory simultaneously affirms public assemblies as giving us hope, and fears them as tyrannical. They often defy our expectations. They arise quickly then as quickly melt away.   Notes, in choosing to study the public assembly, has selected an object that embodies a tension complex enough to support a whole series of investigative case studies. These embody the book. 

A tension can represents a struggle among competing impulses or wills.  Some of those wills may be under the influence of lies and manipulation. We strategically grasp for and place stakes on linguistic terms to give shape or form to that will or impulse, upon which we may have already begun to act, and which may exceed our language's ability to capture or express.  Then we argue about the scope and meaning of those terms, generating another level of struggle with the "real world," often with implications of biopolitical significance.  

Because names have power. But so does performativity.  So do acts and images. Names have power all the more when the acts are performed not by individuals but by a group, a plural agent.  The group's self-naming is an attempt fairly and accurately to do justice to a description or index of the nature of relations between people, each of whom themselves is complex and contradictory and has a history.  

Notes would regard a true alliance as not a mere collection of individuals but also as not a nullification of them. The bodies who appear in the public assemblage converge but don't conform. Everyone within it presents the other with a kind of ethical demand to be recognized as fully as possible. Think "network," not "multitude."  

The preoccupation with recognition gives the sense that Butler may be working towards rediscovery via a new path of the distinction between protest movements which say "I want [x]" versus those that exist simply to say "I am," or the "we demand" versus the "we exist."  Thus one could discern aspects of the Nancy Fraser / Axel Honneth dialogue.

However, solidarity necessarily involves alliance with those whom we don't fully choose and can't fully know, at least not in advance. It's a kind of a contract which we sign even though some of the fine print must always be covered up. 

On the other hand, the parties' very standing or marching together indicates that they share some condition.  The fact that their collective action is bodily contains some clue as to what that condition is. But what? How to understand all this mess?

How then do you resolve a contradiction?  According to the method illustrated throughout Notes:  You look at it with the freshest eyes possible (because even, for example, when "this is what democracy looks like," there is probably more there than meets the eye).  You break open its workings.  You play the contradiction out. Then you transform it.  

Though not all contradictions can or need to be resolved, at least not now, all at once, right here, or by us.

Messy collectives

So to return to the non-identical "I," whatever that might mean, in play seems to be JB's evolving perception of the limits of identity politics, specifically its weakness at conceiving cohabitation and doing politics across difference.  

We might not in fact need to forge a collective identity before we can make or have freedom.  Freedom instead may be embodied in a set of messy dynamic relations, a coalitional framework.  (Sorry Sham 69:  Maybe we don't need the kids to be united for them to never be divided.)

The relationality that Butler has in mind here springs from the precarity of each, and so in turn prefigures a potential solidarity. All this because "an individual who exists purely for himself is an empty abstraction." This could be the motto for the book.  Appropriately so, as it's a Butlerian recasting of a motto from Arendt: "No one is human alone."

A loop here seems to be that as our lives become less liveable, we become more isolated and less autonomous.  Increased liveability means acknowledged interconnectedness, interdependence and sociality, which means greater autonomy, and paradoxically a relaxation of the most unjust, least bargained-for, coercive norms that seek to govern us.  

For Butler, freedom is not "from" people.  It is between people. A pandemic makes this notion both harder and easier to fathom.

However this paradox can also play out differently.  The anguish caused by a yearning for an individualized, ideal self amidst our world's pressures and unequally, unfairly distributed precarity can lead to personal attempts at denial, projection or displacement.  

And when that happens?  Then the call will almost inevitably go out for parallel political movements or powers to back up those yearnings or to play along with them.  

We may wish to ask:  Why can't all the people speak at once, with one voice, in unison? Of course we can, JB offers, if "we" (whomever that is) have succumbed to a powerfully seductive phantasm intriguingly similar to those that fascists want to evoke.  

Are 2020's miserable depths foreseen here, even in a book written in the optimistic wake of the Arab Spring?  (Optimistic, but with Michael Brown's murder and the Ferguson uprising evidently having just occurred, in summer 2014, and mentioned in Butler's text.)

Extraordinary popular delusions, versus ordinary individual ones

So is a public assembly somehow simply an individual writ large, but in public?  Not quite, as Notes would have us think it through.  Or is the answer, rather, "no" but on other levels also "yes"? 

Notes' chapters frequently generate keen insights though how they encourage slippage in the reader's mind between ideas of "the assembly" and "the individual," as if the principles to understand the one can readily be used to understand the other, in how the behaviors of both entities mutually illuminate one another.

How critical should we be of such presuppositions, as method?  What do they gain us?  What do we lose?   Or do we with fresh eyes rediscover old truths, updated for the times?  

It may be useful as a metaphor to imagine the assembly merely as the individual scaled up, but can we assume the same internal, composite, structural dynamics are at work?  Is each individual themselves an assembly, a little microcosm?  Do both "assemblies" function the same, as systems? How do the component parts interact similarly or differently, within each?  Does such a thing as a popular or "general will" even exist?  If it does, how does it differ from somebody's personal will?  Is a crowd greater than the sum of its parts, with each "part" in turn greater than the sum of its parts?

One of Butler's observations is that, in an assembly, individuals behave uncharacteristically, and are capable of things unlike what they would or could do on their own, for example, enacting varieties of resistance.  

However, what does it mean when a person gets "swept up" by an assembly, and behaves "out of character" whilst in it? Is it the same dynamic at work when two individuals lose themselves together or in each other?  What is going on, when a crowd takes on "a life of its own"?  What and why is that new, holistic thing?  What about when we add the effects of hunger, anger, alcohol, propaganda or demagoguery? We can't exactly ask The Crowd; we can only observe its activities and effects.  

So while Notes mentions Hobbes, and indirectly addresses Hardt & Negri, it also brings in Melanie Klein, Shoshana Felman, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Levinas and psychoanalytic feminism.  It happens not to mention Rousseau, Michelet, George Rudé or Canetti, not to mention not to mention Ida B. Wells or Du Bois (pdf.) on mob violence. 

On the other hand, perhaps a benefit of Notes is how it sidesteps some well trodden paths. It comes at the topic of the public assembly from fresh directions, at a moment before populism's tightening grip around the global throat began to make each month feel like a year.

Butler suggests at the outset that she wants to rehabilitate the idea of the public assembly, to redeem it from its totalitarian usurpers, and to try to update it for our current Age of Mediatization.  The "media" here is no longer the tract, the broadside, the radio wave or the Riefenstahl film.  It is the livestream via handheld iPhone, perhaps as curated or distorted by cable or satellite TV.  

Does Notes' ultimate outlook remain too trapped within the individualized and "egological," as Butler might put it?  Do we need then to supplement Notes with the insights of earlier researches and thinking into the people, the crowd, or the mob?  Perhaps it's enough to shelve Notes alongside these other, earlier works and to let them all converse.

Aufheben-ing Arendt

Our annus already-horribilis tempts us to balk before the ever hopeful, Hegelian momentum of how Butler's mind tends to work. Granted, at the end of the Stockholm lecture from which Butler takes one of her chapters (more on this below), she clarifies that she believes that in the years since her early work, she has "moved beyond the Hegelian point of view to some degree." 

Nevertheless, is Butler's thought simply not miserabilist enough to speak to our current predicament?  If JB has a sense of the tragic, mustn't she wear it much more on her sleeve to reach us?  Can it really be true, as the characteristic logic of Notes urges us to believe, that the pain or trauma of avoiding the truth, that the anguish of such failure, may drive us in the end ever positively onward, closer to truth, and togetherness? 

Does JB place simply too much faith in our willingness to be intellectually consistent with ourselves? Does she underestimate our hapless capacity to incorporate into our mental and moral so-called resilience a permanent state of cognitive dissonance, with denial as a lifestyle? 

Does Notes not disqualify itself, through its inability to foresee, just after 2014, how unimaginably coarse, primitive, brutal, simplistic, nihilistic, destructive and utterly stupid global biopolitics and its reigning discourses would become?  Or conversely, could Notes, amidst a global pandemic, inspire renewed, humanitarian awareness of our biopolitical interconnectedness?  The answer might be yes, at least for those non-elites among us do not have guarded compounds in the Hamptons or Rockies to which to decamp.

Notes insistence on interconnectedness among all terrestrial life is mirrored by or embedded in the book's undergirding conceptual mesh, in how ideas that are inter-networked, mutually reinforcing and implicative, recur across its various chapters.  This makes for repetition.  This makes also for one of those works where it's hard to summarize any of it without perceiving a necessity in fairness to recapitulate all of it.  it's an "all-over" philosophy, as Clement Greenberg might have called it.  

The same seriousness makes Notes a hard book to be snarky about.  Butler's utterances are easiest to snark on when taken in isolation, out of context.  This relates to how Notes is a difficult book to skim, as we mentioned earlier, or at least a dangerous one to comment on after only just skimming it.

Butler's characteristically relational habit of thought and dialectical mind-flips train the reader to expect that failure and blockage ultimately will serve as springboards for potential progress.  Like a philosophical Houdini, Butler understands that narrow confines can despite themselves set up the preconditions for escape, if we can but identify them.  

One mind-flip example (from Chapter 3): Does hatred imply an ethical call to the other to become morally lovable?

Another example (from Chapter 4) might be JB's perception that the most depressing part of a political rally or public demonstration is the end of it, when the group breaks up, a perception from which she works conceptually backwards for curiosity about why the earlier, held-together parts of the rally were so life-affirming.

But progress is also always cause for wariness, as Butler portrays it.  The wariness starts from within, as introspection, or a critical attentiveness to the concepts we most habitually reach for, to make sense of our new territory.  To follow the logic of the introspection flows into extrospection.  

Notes' recurring engagement with Arendt illustrates some of that flow.  Arendt's discoveries are offered as an indispensable point of departure for the challenges of our historical moment, not least in how they fail us.  They advance us far in helpful directions, then ultimately lose traction.  We can draw illuminating lessons from that failure, then use those new discoveries to progress still further.  

An example of a key discovery, pulled by JB from Arendt: Equality between people is both a pre-condition and a goal of political action.

An example of a key failure in Arendt's writings portrayed here surrounds the scope of her distinction between "public" and "private," which, if we uncritically adhere to it in the face of today's conditions, lands us in unproductive territory.  Butler views Arendt's distinction to be, at least for our purposes today, a difference that is not really a difference, like that between "mind" and "body," which is in fact a disavowal.  Arendt's basic approach gives us a useful head start in a meaningful direction, which then hits a limit beyond which it must be opened out and rethought to work for us globally, now. At very least, we need to expand notions of freedom and equality, beyond Arendt's.

The lesson? Our teachers teach us a lot, not least;  What do we learn from the very inadequacy of their beliefs, or what they failed to do with them?  About how their lessons do and don't help us and others, in the here and how, and about the unique properties of the new moment with which we're faced?  How must we and can we best go beyond writings such as Arendt's, indeed with the help of conceptual tools that could only have been forged by going through them?

The path beyond is sometimes convoluted.  It might progress only in stages.  Rejection of what does not work for us sometimes is only achieved after having passed through a phase wherein our attention is seized by something clear and dislikable that the useless thing has inevitably thrown up in opposition to itself, and attacking that thing first.

Beyond a boundary, then back to talk about it

Stick with Butler's book and it may leave the lasting imprint of a habit, that when faced with any hotly contested word, one must define it backwards, as with "we," above. Another chief example here is "humanity."

We may become conditioned, when we espy a dispute nosing over the horizon, no longer to begin to define our terms from a fixed point at a center from which a core nugget of meaning supposedly radiates, as might an etymologist.  Rather, we will make immediate reference to the term's outermost limits, just beyond its event horizon of meaning, to the definition's assumed and normatively agreed upon boundaries.  These latter may be foggy and confused in our minds.  We all may even have suppressed or avoided directly talking about them.

Every concept, if it is to have a definition, must have a boundary.  However Is everything bounded not therefore on some level necessarily an empty shell, a vessel if not a void? A thing is its boundaries, because without them it would not "be"?  

The meaning of the "human" becomes, in Butlerian logic, its preconditions, or the non-human, or all organic life, the environment that serves as our support, and so on.  Definitions often must be re-defined by shifting their outer boundaries, which in turn reframes and reshuffles their internal content.  

Perhaps the most interesting or button-pushing definitions usually and fundamentally are in fact hidden debates.  The definition's contents are churning on levels below the surface.  Its outer limits are subject to unnoticed boundary creep or line drawing exercises, and are contested in ways that we may have not yet even arrived at a good language to articulate.  Notes would advise that our duty is to be  open, inquisitive and investigative about all of this, for the sake of human rights ("human" expansively defined), of social and psychic health, and ethics.

Butler's interest in a lack of fixed frames goes hand in hand with her open-mindedness, but also with her keen eye for the species of bad faith whereby our definitional boundaries enable us to to "decide" things in a non-explicit way, such that the decision does not even appear on our conscious radar.

If an appearance (as at a theater) presupposes both a stage (footlights, floorboards) and a look (the spectator), the spectator can't look everywhere, at the entire theater, at once and constantly, can they? If not, what becomes of those who "act" but at whom we're not looking?  Or those who cannot or don't "act" because they are too destitute to make it to the stage or even inside the theater? What about those who give their best performances away from the spotlight, or prefer masks or camouflage?  How can we fully choose our mode of performativity, when we're perforce thrust onto the stage with a predetermined script? What if the stage is not so benign, neutral or indifferent to the identity of those under whom its floorboards creak? 

Moreover, How can we avoid infatuation with hyper-visibility, the most blinkered norm yet? Would Butler have us believe the most liveable life to be that which has the most  viewers?  No.   But would our currently hegemonic biopolitical regime have us believe this?  JB would say: Basically yeah.  

What then is the difference between a performance that's effective and a life that's liveable?  How do I know whether my life is valuable or worth living at all?  JB's response might be: "What's your definition of an 'I'?  If you're trying to figure out a real, meaningful answer to that question in isolation, as something other than a social creature, then you're already in trouble."

interlude in Stockholm

Butler's method here might often recommend that, to see our way out of an impasse, we try to reverse in our vision the relation between foreground and background.  For example, we could view the human and its non-human, foundational infrastructure as we might view a painting and its support. What if the two are not so inseparable?  How might they be interdependent? What if we turned the painting to face the wall, and contemplated instead its wooden stretcher or cross bars?  (TiR thinks of curator Andrew Lamprecht 2004 "Flip" exhibition.)  Then had our attention inevitably drawn to the usually invisible labels or markings on the back or underside of the work, that might show who owns it, who packed and shipped it, how it was catalogued, and when and from where and whom it may have been looted?

Notes is full of little exercises in reframing like that.  

A fine example of Butler's skill at this is contained in the "extended version" of Chapter 3, or the original talk on which the chapter is based, the 2011 Neale Wheeler Watson Lecture, given at the Nobel Museum in Stockholm.  

The on-line video of the lecture is broken out across several segments.  The last segments feature a Q&A session which is not transcribed or published in Notes. We think that it includes a dramatic or at least suspenseful exchange.

Butler's questioner is, we believe, a theologian. We'll try to reproduce his question as best we can (viewable here, about six minutes in):

"I wonder a little bit about grievability.  If I understand you correctly, you use grievability as something that can identify what we count as human.  But I wonder . . . 

"There was in the editorial today in one of the main papers . . .   There was this argument for lowering the weeks for allowing abortion, because -- she used the example or gave the example of an aborted fetus surviving for a few hours after the abortion, gasping for breath, and the nurses not being able to being in the room, remaining in the room, because of their ethical -- being ethically overwhelmed by this fetus not counting as a human life. 

"But I wonder, to me, it seems to me that in this instance, grievability meets something that is rejected or unchosen and does not count as a human life.  But does grievability here make it or in some way constitute human life as well?"

We take Mr. Sverker's question to arise from the controversy surrounding the "conscientious objection" for nurses, much discussed in Sweden not least around the time of Butler's May 2011 lecture.  A good encapsulation of the status of the debate around the time there is a 2013 European Committee of Social Rights complaint; it contains a good capsule synopsis with citations to contemporaneous news articles, here.  

Prof. Rebecca Selberg wrote a thought provoking interrogation of the discourse surrounding the issue, including an impressive analysis of some 2840 items appearing in the Swedish press from 2010 to 2016  It is here.  Selberg's article is expressly about framing, of the arguments in circulation.

How then does Butler frame, or reframe, her interlocutor's question?  Her reply, from the video:

"But I think that there are, for instance in the situation of abortion,  one could say that the . . . [a thoughtful pause] --  well, with abortion you could say that the aborted fetus is grieved precisely as a life that did not live, right? -- or as something that was not able to take form or shape as an existing life. And then there's a different view that would say that the fetus is grieved or grievable because it's already a human life, right?

"But we can grieve that which already exists and is lost, or we can grieve that which does not have a chance to come into existence. We can even grieve [a slight, illuminating smile] that which never had a chance to come into existence, which is why [the smile fades] sometimes women can grieve childlessness itself.

"So I don't think grievability works in one way, and it doesn't necessarily work to humanize. What it does is, it indexes, at least in these examples, modes of attachment and possibly phantasmatic investment and lost possibilities.  But I think those are different issues."

We feel like it's safe to say that Butler and her questioner approach the matter from pretty different perspectives.  But the viewer is relieved to see an exchange that ends up being enlightening and respectful.  Butler deftly reframes but remains engaged, on a hot button issue, with clarity, diplomacy, conceptual precision and overall Butlerishness.  

We who believe in freedom

Finally, on coalition building, TiR would like whimsically to believe that Butler's entire book was written merely as an elaborate ploy to bring the eyes of more readers to a fantastic Bernice Johnson Reagon passage, from a 1981 talk, which Notes quotes:

"I feel as if I’m gonna keel over any minute and die. That is often what it feels like if you’re really doing coalition work. Most of the time you feel threatened to the core and if you don’t, you’re not really doing no coalescing. . . 

"You don’t go into coalition because you just like it. The only reason you would consider trying to team up with somebody who could possibly kill you, is because that’s the only way you can figure you can stay alive. . . . 

"That's why we have to have coalitions. Cause I ain't gonna let you live unless you let me live. Now there's danger in that, but there's also the possibility that we can both live — if you can stand it."

Butler probably found Reagon's piece, "Coalition Politics: Turning the Century," in the great 1983 Home Girls anthology.  Reagon's words close that book and rightly so. She is a show stopper.

The excerpt in Notes is enlightening also for what it omits.  Reagon goes on to think about what coalitional politics looks like across a long time scale:

"It only matters if you make a commitment to be around for another fifty more years.  There are some grey haired women I see running around occasionally, and we have to talk to those folks about how come they didn't commit suicide forty years ago. Don't take everything they say because some of the stuff they gave up to stay around ain't worth considering. But be sure to get on your agenda some old people and try to figure out what it will be like if you are a raging radical fifty years from today. . . . 

 "Think about yourself that way.  What would you be life if you had white hair and had not given up your principles? . . . They hold the key to turning the century with our principles and ideals intact. They can teach you how to cross cultures and not kill yourself. . . . they didn't miss a step.  They could stand it all."

Butler chooses not to quote these reflections.  Which is fine, but draws attention back to how Notes is a kind of a "Big Now" book.  It seems duty bound to be as wide, global, and expansively inclusive as possible in its view of the contemporary moment.   

Notes does not attempt to foresee future trends.  Nor do we need it to.  The reader knows all too well about the depressing, maddening and serious setbacks in the years since its 2011-14 composition.  That knowledge forms part of the reader's relationship with and response to Notes' apparent confidence in the powers of reason, logic, inquiry and truth. 

At the same time, Notes does address itself to the future in a way.  Its method feels rooted in the belief that if we can get straight and firmly rooted with ethical practices that are deeply meaningful in and for the present, that these will carry us forward to a healthy place together.  One such key principle, nonviolence, looms as all the more indispensable given Butler's assumption that every relation of interdependency among humans will involve some measure of aggression, as when coalition partners both need but also kinda wanna murder each other. 

Reagon however is more explicit about how the survival of a coalition involves attentiveness to a "now" within a broader temporality, about looking back while trying to see ahead, and to figure out how to survive long enough to get there, with integrity and "ideals intact."  

Butler would no doubt agree that along the way towards that hoped-for future, our personal and collective identities, such as they are, will continue often to pass through all the elasticity, confusion and contradiction to which Notes appears so attuned.  What does the work of "coalescing" look like when it happens not only across the span of the present-now but also across the future, when it calls on us to try to build messy coalitions with others from within the messy coalitions represented by our own individual histories? 

Notes is a difficult book to read while in pandemic isolated lockdown theory mode.  But it is also a complicatedly helpful one.

posted by TiR at 7:01 AM