Dr. Judith Butler delivers the spring 2012 Wall Exchange lecture at the Vogue Theatre in downtown Vancouver on May 24, 2012
Livable life without positing single ideal for that life not based on essence, Donna Harraway, complex relationalities that constitute bodily life, we don’t need ideal forms of human, complex ways of understanding sets of relationships
Bodies form in networks of resistance, and produce structures of support and dependency also to evince
Key point on bodies, not only agentic, active cannot understand forms of relationality if we don’t understand complex relation vulnerability and activity of political resistance. We are vulnerable on the street, w/o permits opposing police/state … shorn of protection Critiques bare life is political exposure.
VULNERABILITY AND DEFIANCE women-vulnerability then petition paternal state. Invests state with responsibility for achievement of feminist goals.
Woman are vulnerable and capable of resistance. Feminist self-defence — slut walks, those who oppose harassment and injury. Good reasons to argue differential vulnerability
Are you a post-Feminist? the question that emerges HOW TO THINK THE VULNERABILITY OF WOMEN AND FEMINIST AGENCY
How to make feminist claim effectively, feminist resist modes of paternalism that re-instate modes of inequality. Gender-defining attributes vulnerability/invulnerability as distributed unequally under capitalism. Manage populations is to distribute vulnerability unequally, so that vulnerable precarious populations, and political strategies are devised to ameliorate conditions of precarity. Unveven Grievability of populations more worthy of memorialization and public grieving than others, populations ungrievable, whose labour is episodic or precarious, abandoned through negligence, injurable, with impunity, implict/explicit marking.
Redistributive strategies: invulnerable/impermeable without needs of protection. Effects of field of power that acts through bodies. Feminine – vulnerable, masculine = impermeable, invulnerable Psychoanalytic feminists forgetting of one’s own vulnerability and projection elsewhere. I was never vulnerable, and if it was it wasn’t true and I have no memory … political syntax of disavowal.
Some person or group denies vulnerability modes of denial/disavowal neoliberal economics act as if you are invulnerable to living with anxiety, dispossessed. Those who seek to expose others to vulnerability, obtain position of invulnerability for themselves. SHARED VULNERABILITY less as existential as claim BODIES ARE INVARIABLY dependent on social institutions/relations and instiutions.
Social Ontology Basis for new forms of coalition, seen in contemporary politics of the Street. Bodily vulnerable presupposes a social world, vulnerable to others, and institutions, a social modality through which bodies exist my vulnerability your vulnerability, vulnerability can be projected and denied, exploited and manipulated in the production of inequality.
social contract efforts to challenge and contest, under the name of precarity, takes aim at forms of rationality/representation and strategy that inform this condition
Differential modes of vulnerability
Not one subject does this to another, rather a set of strategies produce the situatioin in which the population cannot appear at all, in the USA native peoples, and Canada is related. Native peoples are given discursive life about founding of America, but these narratives become the means of effacement, acts of slaughter and killing which is still called Columbus Day. Re-Name Indigenous Peoples Day.
Comparative study of genocide, or comparable history of forcible displacement: Congo, Germany, will there be an memory, a memory maintained through discursive and transmissible means, to preserve the memory of vulnerability of bodies, requires a memorialization that must be repeated over time and space, memory is socially maintained and not cognitive. Its a social process.
Argentine: Mothers in Buenos Aires, to publicly protest disappearance of their children not identitarian nor maternalist, opposed brutality of the regime, protest any forgetting of that brutality.
Two points about vulnerability 1. vulnerability cannot be associated exclusive w/ injurability. Part of what a body does, is to open on to the body of another, set of others, bodies are not enclosed, always OUTSIDE themselves, dispossessed through the senses, lost in another, tactile/visual/auditory comport us beyond ourselves. Modes of ecstatic relationality 2. Body can be a site where memories are transmitted, body is a point of transfer, where your history passes through mine, I don’t have to experience your history to transmit your history, a certain operation of translation that doesn’t purport to translate everything. Bound up with one another. Mode or relationality
We not just as bodies these spatial and bounded creatures. We can never transcend that boundary completely, but we are also the histories we never lived, but we transmit in the name of the history of the oppressed. Israel prohibits expression of na’qba. They are seeking to regulate memory, to consign a form of dispossession and suffering to oblivion.
In all of these struggles the body is central to the fight against oblivion. No history can be inscribed on a body without vulnerability, the body not as substance and enclosure, but a site of injurability passionate exposure, receptivity
Body and Coalition
Vulnerability and ordinary discourse as episodic, the condition of our vulnerability is not precisely changeable a certain way of opening on to the world, asserts our existence as a relational one. A condition co-extensive with human/creaturely life. Vulnerability is a way of opening up to the world, it asserts our very existence as a relational one.
Adrianna Cavarerro One of the key moments of politics, constitutive ethical moment: WHO ARE YOU?? not necessarily a single person that poses this question, who are you space of appearance for the other, no pre-established category will be able to answer in advance the question that is posed. The who are you is infinitely open unanswerable in order to remain an ethical one.
Precariousness precarity is differentially distributed. Isabel Lorry, Larent Berlant, under conditions of neoliberalism. Maybe precarious is what we feel or rather not feel, and feel the impetus to not feel it, precarious those bonds that sustain forms of life. dispose them towards equality as ideal worth struggling for. A bond is flawed or frayed is lost irrecoverable.
The Tea Party rejoice about individuals who fail to take responsibility, will face death or disease as result. People who don’t take responsibility, will face death, rejoice clapping. At such moments a social bond has been destroyed, in ways that deny a shared precariousness, a shared ethos and politics, one that underscores local and global interdependence, and resists unequal distribution of precarity and grievability. We really need to see the precarity of the one who takes that sadistic joy, the bond of interdependency with the one whose death is being joyously imagined.
Break with lure of paternalism, not rejecting all the state. We cannot presume interdependency is same as social harmony. constituted from the inside, from the condition of a pre-contractual set of relations that pertain to social embodiment, negotiated in social/political/economic spheres.
Interdependency is not social harmony, not way to dissociate dependency and aggression once and for all. We require one another to live, our survinal and well being are negotiate in economic/political spheres, our precarious is what makes spheres blend into each other.
Seeking recourse to broad existential and humanist claims BUT, we see we have left existential domain, risk of statelessness, precarious defines our existence as POLITICAL beings, and political Whose lives preserved, protected valued, mourned, and whose disposable and ungrievable. Dependent on economic and social structures.
Precarity indissocialbe from that politics of interdependency … our common non-foundation, nothing founds us outside of a struggle to establish those bonds by which we are sustained. Political significance as assembling as BODIES, does not have to be organized on high, nor have a central message to assert a PERFORMATIVE FORCE we are HERE, we are STILL HERE, we have not yet been DISPOSED of, precarity with social and political forms of agency. When the bodies deemed disposable assembe in public view its a way of saying we have not disappeared. Political and public institutions are bound to represent the people, and EQUALITY as presupposition of existence.
Eygptian Revolution transitional military government, way a certain sociability was established in the square, horizontal relations, relations of equality became part of the very resistance.
Unchosen proximity to those we’ve never chosen to be close to a pre-contractual inter-dependency is at work, it is always necessary, and sometimes promising and alive. ends at 1:09 30 seconds
On Precarity producing possibility of lives not touched by other lives IMPERMEABLE TO INCURSION, militarism/nationalism, stoked by idea of never being attacked or one coming into territory that can do harm, anti-immigration discourses … dealing with situation of precarity at those moments, a spectre of being destoryed, penetrated, agressed upon suggests a level of political anxiety that focuses on body and capacity of body to be entered, aggressed upon, to have its solidity and control threatened at fundamental level. It is a political strategy to effectively externalize and deposit that felt sense of precarity in other populations and keep populations precarious who are feared and loathed. they end up increasing their own sense of precarity through a mode of subjugation that is unlivable in those who must live it.
Occupy Movement Occupy moment is not over, what are the new strategies, what are the new ways of occupying buildings, producing demonstrations and getting the word out. Armed revolutionary struggle?? What we are seeing are contours of a new form of conflict, it began as movement draw attention to differential levels of wealth, rich are getting richer and fewer and poor are getting larger and poorer. Police power became at forefront of movement when public space was taken away through police action. Traditional modes of civil disobedience and non-violence are not recognized, police don’t handcuff, they were thrown to ground and beaten. It effectively says traditions governing non-violent civil disobedience are no longer being honoured. Making protests larger, global, over-whelming, so actual legitimacy of state is called into question.
Non-Violence briefly is NOT passivity, it is the cultivation of the force of resistance, it involves bodily action, pressure and presence, and is not simply taking-it.
Strategic Essentialism I don’t think we are the 99% is strategic essentialism. Isn’t the only basis on which we mobilize together. It is an umbrella term to include differences without asserting economic oppression as the primary mode of oppression. There are struggles race/sexuality/gender … those struggles are absolutely necessary and we shouldn’t lament them. We are having those struggles and that is what unity means, unity means struggling. I resist the language of FRAGMENTATION, groups do leave, they can’t be in coalition together, Hanging IN, in coalitions where it isn’t easy, open conflict/struggle, that is UNITY, unity is agreeing to stay in and struggle, unity is not uniformity. Because they stay together because the STAKES are really high.
migrants The effort to de-politicize migrants, is a certain kind of training in good citizenship. Accept implicit forms of censorship as preconditions of your membership.
Vulnerability in a way I’m saying 2 things at same time: 1 vulnerability is shared condition that can not be denied, 2 vulnerability is a condition that is denied all the time.forms of torture that took place under Bush Administration, involved efforts to feminize the bodies of Arab men in out-sourced prisons. I think it is a complex issue, the way in which torture worked to emasculate at the same time it identified/consolidated the idea, that those tortured are homosexual/women. The position of intense vulnerability would be that of homosexual or woman.
Physical violence and vulnerability: I support non-violent forms of resistance, but one of most important things for me, was learning forms of self-defense. That I wouldn’t be ok on the street if I didn’t have skills of self-defense. When a cop is coming at you with a baton, or when you’re being sprayed, there is a right to self-defense and what is the form that takes. Forms of COLLECTIVE support, to make it difficult for that attack to take place. Interpose themselves in front of one another. Sometimes our act of defense will be re-named as provocation, there is no way to fully control how it will signify. Politically self-defense works in some ways I don’t agree with … use self-defense to legitimate every act of aggression. It’s a very vigilant practice to insist on self-defense and to make it not an alibi for the kind of violence we are opposing. Don’t replicate the violence we are opposing but to stop the violence.
Tea Party: I am in favour of freedom of assembly, I am anxious that freedom of assembly is being taken away in many parts of the globe. Should be for on the left and the right. I would defend the right of horrible people to collect on street, including Tea Party cause there’s a LIBERAL core to my Leftism. I hate it, but I wouldn’t take their right away.
Vulnerability of pre-contract: only ethically obligated to those with whom we are already contracted belong to same nation-state we are born into/legalized within. We have to think ethical/political obligations that exceed the forms of contract. Contracts tend to produce ideas of nation state that are exclusionary, what are my extra-nation obligations, who am I when I am not an individual, do I need another kind of political vocabulary. It’s always possible to say, well, if you think of sexually progressive circles, they make a contract to enter into an arrangement, they are vulnerable in a way they didn’t think, now can’t be in that contract … a kind of leftist conceit, we have the ideal form, consent to ideal form and find out its radically unlivable. What are the conditions of liveablity, how to communicate them, and how to live them. What are the concrete conditions of liveability, pertain to organizatio of our ethical and poltiical bonds. We are vulnerable in ways that can’t be accomodated by ideas of choice and knowledge that are presupposed by contract, we are already vulnerable to others that in effect define us as bodily and social beings and what does that say about our global responsibilities and what does that say about us as global creatures.
Dr. Judith Butler has a follow-up discussion with UBC Faculty at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at UBC