Watch Professor Judith Butler’s lecture, ‘Freedom of Assembly, or Who are the People?‘ held on September 15, 2013 in Istanbul at Boğaziçi University.
The freedom of assembly is a basic right, but how is it to be understood? How is the freedom of assembly related to the freedom of expression? The right of assembly cannot be asserted by a single person, so how do we understand the plurality that makes that claim? It seems that “the people” assert the right of assembly, but who decides who “the people” are?
And how do actual assemblies change our idea of what it means to assert a right? Rights are not only asserted vocally, but also enacted with movement, stillness, gesture, and silence.
Indeed, there can be no freedom of assembly without bodily enactments, including speech. Consequently, we have to rethink the bodily forms in which this right is enacted.
And though modes of assembly and solidarity are at once embodied and virtual, the very idea of assembly presupposes that bodies act together. What kind of right is that which is enacted bodily, and who are the people who enact this right? Are these “the people”?
🙂 Butler is describing the collection of peoples in the square.
8:50 The Assembly is already speaking before it utters its declarative speech act.
The ‘we’ voice is already enacted by the assembly of bodies, their gestures their movements. Actions where people come together who enact their convergence is irreducible to a single claim. Plurality of embodied actors who enact their claims sometimes through words sometimes not.
Freedom of Assembly
a collection of people associated in a demonstration May be spoken or enacted in another way
such acts as plural action, who enact their convergent purposes can’t be reduced to one collective we
13:00 Does FOA depend on being protected by government? or from government?
Freedom of Association independent of every government. When the legitimacy of a gov’t or power of state is being contested by such an association.
power of state to protect rights and power of state to withdraw that protection – arbitrary and legitimate power.
What is being opposed, is that FOA can be lost as a right when State opposes such assembly. Financial institutions transforming public entitlements into goods and market services.
Legitimacy of a gov’t that has assumed authoritarian powers, no one is say free markets and democracy work together.
Privatization and authoritarianism are being opposed, the state moves in to suppress FOA to censor those viewpoints and confine those who hold them.
FOA can’t be a specific right protected by state.
FOA must precede and exceed any gov’t. not to condone mob rule, but FOA is a precondition of politics itself, bodies can move and gather in unregulated ways, redefine public by virtue of these enactments.
They don’t speak in 1 voice or 1 language.
popular sovereignty distinct from state sovereignty.
FOA and idea of popular sovereignty.
20:00 Sovereignty is not bad word, think of indigenous peoples struggle for sovereignty
The meaning of PS has never been exhausted by the act of voting, the exercise of S. neither begins or ends with the act of voting. something of PS remains untransferable marking the outside of the electoral process.
S of the People: critical, resistance, revolution. PS translates into electoral power when people vote, but doesn’t exhaust it, untranslatable
PS runs counter to and exceeds, outruns every parliamentary form that it institutes and grounds. PS is a condition of an Parliamentary character, it threatens every Parl with dysfunction, dissolution an “anarchist interval” one that shows up at moments of founding and moments of dissolution
Who are the People?
24:00
We can’t simply point to the people, aerial photographs, (not demographic forensics) because there is a FRAME. limited perspective but which its object is selectively crafted.
Editing/Selecting what and who will count. Who the people are — technology that establishes and disestablishes who counts as people.
Some people are outside purview of street and camera i.e., prison …
Arrive together in some space and time and photographed in some exclusive way. Speaking in unison is a fantasy. “we the people” always misses, some fail to represent, doing something else, texting, blogging some not speaking at all, so THE PEOPLE never arrives and speaks in unity
28:00 We the People is NOT A UNITY
Butler totally dismantles any notion of unity. We have to re-think who the people are, some people don’t want what others want. Fragility and ferocity that marks hegemonic struggle over name the PEOPLE are signs of its democratic operation.
The PLURAL WE: I don’t describe who the we is, but I POSIT A WE
30:30 Something NON-Electoral is at work the ANARCHIST INTERVAL. The people who speak the WE constitute themselves as the people, standing silent together in the face of the police.
People
pre-existing collection, can’t adequately rep. collectivity because it is in process of being made.
WE: needs desires demands not fully known, practices of Self-determinination not same as self-representation.
Brings people into being who it names = PERFORMATIVE
33:00 Popular Sovereignty as distinct from State Sovereignty
PS only makes sense in this act of separating itself from SS
34:00 The Enactment of political Self-Determination (it is not always just verbal)
1:14 She speaks on splits and disharmony.
1:18 She says that Michael Hardt’s recent work on love is problematic and she disagrees with his view.
1:19 When a group of people do come together to claim rights etc. they do so that indexes the people or the populace
1:22 opposition to entire scheme of values, and other values must be brought to fore and that’s about solicitation, and persuasion, a hegemonic contest of who the people can be. The people as a term is a hegemonic struggle.
1:25 How does the relationship to police power have to be cultivated to expand the life of a solidarity/democratic movement so it isn’t condemned to be ephemeral. It requires an elaborate network including lawyers and media people willing to take risks.
1:34 Reply to second last question. “Citizen” can be used by state to bring them, appropriate them, instrumentalize them and interpellate them
1:37 Reply to last question: study and practice of social movements more broadly