Here is an interview Butler did with Owen Jones, who amusingly takes her back to Gender Trouble and not a lot of attention paid to her most recent work. But this interview does allow her to update us on how she has moved from 1989, specifically the inclusion of trans. Here it is.
Category: precarity
Judith Butler
Judith Butler intervew in The New Yorker February 9, 2020
’m not a completely crazy idealist who would say, “There’s no situation in which I would commit an act of violence.” I’m trying to shift the question to “What kind of world is it that we seek to build together?” Some of my friends on the left believe that violent tactics are the way to produce the world they want. They think that the violence falls away when the results they want are realized. But they’ve just issued more violence into the world.
And you point out that in the liberal individualist way of thinking, the individual is always an adult male in his prime, who, just at this particular moment when we encounter him, happens to have no needs and dependencies that would bind him to others.
That model of the individual is comic, in a way, but also lethal. The goal is to overcome the formative and dependent stages of life to emerge, separate, and individuate—and then you become this self-standing individual. That’s a translation from German. They say selbstständig, implying that you stand on your own. But who actually stands on their own? We are all, if we stand, supported by any number of things. Even coming to see you today—the pavement allowed me to move, and so did my shoes, my orthotics, and the long hours spent by my physical therapist. His labor is in my walk, as it were. I wouldn’t have been able to get here without any of those wonderful technologies and supporting relations.
Acknowledging dependency as a condition of who any of us happens to be is difficult enough. But the larger task is to affirm social and ecological interdependence, which is regularly misrecognized as well. If we were to rethink ourselves as social creatures who are fundamentally dependent upon one another—and there’s no shame, no humiliation, no “feminization” in that—I think that we would treat each other differently, because our very conception of self would not be defined by individual self-interest.
It enraged me then, as it does now, that some lives were considered to be more worthy of grieving publicly than others, depending on the status and recognizability of those persons and their relations. And that came home to me in a different way in the aftermath of 9/11, when it was very clear that certain lives could be highly memorialized in the newspapers and others could not. Those who were openly mourned tended to lead lives whose value was measured by whether they had property, education, whether they were married and had a dog and some children. The traditional heterosexual frame became the condition of possibility for public mourning.
We can also see this in broader public policies. There are those for whom health insurance is so precious that it is publicly assumed that it can never be taken away, and others who remain without coverage, who cannot afford the premiums that would increase their chances of living—their lives are of no consequence to those who oppose health care for all. Certain lives are considered more grievable. We have to get beyond the idea of calculating the value of lives, in order to arrive at a different, more radical idea of social equality.
If “that is just the way the world is,” even though we wish it were different, then we concede the intractability of that version of reality. We’ve said such “realistic” things about gay marriage before it became a reality. We said it years ago about a black President. We’ve said it about many things in this world, about tyrannical or authoritarian regimes we never thought would come down. To stay within the framework of Realpolitik is, I think, to accept a closing down of horizons, a way to seem “cool” and skeptical at the expense of radical hope and aspiration.
Sometimes you have to imagine in a radical way that makes you seem a little crazy, that puts you in an embarrassing light, in order to open up a possibility that others have already closed down with their knowing realism. I’m prepared to be mocked and dismissed for defending nonviolence in the way that I do. It might be understood as one of the most profoundly unrealistic positions you could hold in this life. But when I ask people whether they would want to live in a world in which no one takes that position, they say that that would be terrible.
We see how socialist ideals, for instance, are dismissed as “fanciful” in the current election. I find that the dismissive form of realism is guarding those borders and shutting down those horizons of possibility. It reminds me of parents who say, “Oh, you’re gay . . .” or “Oh, you’re trans—well, of course I accept you, but it’s going to be a very hard life.” Instead of saying, “This is a new world, and we are going to build it together, and you’re going to have my full support.”
Our interdependency serves as the basis of our ethical obligations to one another. When we strike at one another, we strike at that very bond.
In a couple of places in the book, you say that nonviolence is not an absolute principle, or that you’re not arguing that no one has the right to self-defense—you are just suggesting a new set of guiding principles. I found myself a little disappointed every time you make that caveat. Does it not weaken your argument when you say, “I’m arguing against self-defense, but I’m not saying that no one has a right to self-defense”?
If I were giving a rational justification for nonviolence as a position, which would make me into a much more proper philosopher than I am—or wish to be—then it would make sense to rule out all exceptions. But we don’t need a new rational justification for nonviolence. We actually need to pose the question of violence and nonviolence within a different framework, where the question is not “What ought I to do?” but “Who am I in relation to others, and how do I understand that relationship?”
Once social equality becomes the framework, I’m not sure we are deliberating as individuals trying to come up with a fully rational position, consistent and complete and comprehensive for all circumstances. We might then approach the world in a way that would make violence less likely, that would allow us to think about how to live together given our anger and our aggression, our murderous wishes—how to live together and to make a commitment to that, outside of the boundaries of community or the boundaries of the nation. I think that that’s a way of thinking, an ethos—I guess I would use that word, “ethos,” as something that would be more important to me than a fully rational system that is constantly confounded by exceptions.
You talk about nonviolence, rather unexpectedly, as a force, and even use words like “militant” and “aggressive.” Can you explain how they go together?
I think many positions assume that nonviolence involves inhabiting the peaceful region of the soul, where you are supposed to rid yourself of violent feelings or wishes or fantasy. But what interests me is cultivating aggression into forms of conduct that can be effective without being destructive.
A leader can defy the laws of his own country and test to see how much power he can take. He can imprison dissenters and inflict violence on neighboring regions. He can block migrants from certain countries or religions. He can kill them at a moment’s notice. Many people are excited by this kind of exercise of power, its unchecked quality, and they want in their own lives to free up their aggressive speech and action without any checks: no shame, no legal repercussions. They have this leader who models that freedom. The sadism intensifies and accelerates.
I think, as many people do, that Trump has licensed the overt violence of white supremacy and also unleashed police violence by suspending any sense of constraint. Many people thrill to see embodied in their government leader a will to destruction that is uninhibited, invoking a kind of moral sadism as its perverse justification. It’s going to be up to us to see if people can thrill to something else.
The tweet acts as an incitation but also as a virtual attack with consequences; it gives public license to violence. He models a kind of entitlement that positions him above the law. Those who support him, even love him, want to live in that zone with him. He is a sovereign unchecked by the rule of law he represents, and many think that is the most free and courageous kind of liberation. But it is liberation from all social obligation, a self-aggrandizing sovereignty of the individual.Advertisement
Just to be clear, you’re not saying that these juries saw violence being perpetrated against somebody nonviolent and decided to let the perpetrator off. You’re saying that they actually perceived violence—
—in the radically subjugated black body, or the radically constrained black body, or the black body that’s running with fear away from some officer who is threatening them with violence. And if you’re a jury—especially a white jury that thinks it’s perfectly reasonable to imagine that a black person, even under extreme restraint, could leap up and kill you in a flash—that’s phantasmagoria. It’s not individual psychopathology but a shared phantasmatic scene.
Aaron Benanav
Countries with high levels of robotization are not necessarily the ones that have lost the most industrial jobs.
Automation isn’t wiping out jobs. It’s that our engine of growth is winding down.
‘Our collective sense that the pace of labor-saving technological change is accelerating is an illusion.’
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/23/robots-economy-growth-wages-jobs
An army of robots now scrub floors, grow microgreens and flip burgers. Due to advances in artificial intelligence, computers will supposedly take over much more of the service sector in the coming decade, including jobs in law, finance and medicine that require years of education and training.
Will automation-induced job loss tear society apart? The question has even influenced the US presidential race. Candidate Andrew Yang blames automation for a long-simmering crisis of underemployment. He plans to hand out free money to every American citizen in the form of a monthly “dividend” of $1,000.
Poor job quality and stagnant wages are major problems in America and across much of the world, but it is wrong to blame these problems on an accelerating pace of automation, which is hardly in evidence.
Automation Cassandras often point to the manufacturing sector as the precedent for what will happen to the rest of the economy. It is true that, for the manufacturing industry, a jobs apocalypse has already taken place.
And this process is occurring across the world: according to the UN, the share of all workers employed in manufacturing is falling globally, even as industrial production per person continues to rise. This is the case in wealthy and poor countries. Yet it is hasty to ascribe these trends to accelerating automation.
While machines now make everything from shoes and shirts to cars and computers, there has been no significant uptick in the pace of labor-saving productivity growth in industry in recent decades.
On the contrary, industrial efficiency has been improving at a sluggish pace for decades, leading the Nobel-prize-winning economist Robert Solow to quip, in 1987: “We see the computer age everywhere except in the productivity statistics.”
Our collective sense that the pace of labor-saving technological change is accelerating is an illusion. It’s like the feeling you get when looking out of the window of a train car as it slows down at a station: passing cars on the other side of the tracks appear to speed up. Labor-saving technical change appears to be happening at a faster pace than before only when viewed from across the tracks – that is, from the standpoint of our ever more slow-growing economies.
That is the real problem: a pervasive and increasingly global economic stagnation – affecting industry especially – that is marked by low rates of investment, low rates of economic growth and hence low rates of job creation.
In the context of economic stagnation, even small increases in productivity are enough to destroy more manufacturing jobs than are created.
The best explanation for this worsening economic stagnation is that, since the 1970s, more and more countries adopted export-led growth strategies, built up manufacturing sectors and began to compete in global markets.
That led in turn to heightened competition, making fast-paced industrial expansion – and fast-paced economic growth – much more difficult to achieve.
In this context, countries with high levels of robotization are not necessarily the ones that have lost the most industrial jobs. On the contrary, Germany, Japan and South Korea have some of the highest levels of robots per manufacturing worker but also boast higher manufacturing employment shares.
In Germany and Japan, automation helps firms preserve jobs in manufacturing in the face of intense international competition. Chinese firms have been investing heavily in robotics in the past few years, to preserve jobs as domestic wages rise and competition from even lower-cost countries intensifies.
Meanwhile, no other sector has replaced industry as a major economic growth engine. In country after country, slowing industrial expansion has been accompanied by falling rates of economic growth.
Some services like wholesale trade have seen spurts of rapid productivity growth, but these fail to coalesce into sustained, sector-wide efficiency gains like those endemic to manufacturing over the history of its development.
The wider environment of slowing growth explains the prevailing low labor demand largely by itself.
Once again, the major problem in labor markets is a slowing pace of job creation, associated with this sluggish economic expansion, rather than an accelerating pace of automation-induced job destruction.
From the 1970s, when industrial competition began to heat up and economic growth rates deteriorated, unemployment levels in many countries first rose and then stubbornly refused to fall. Politicians began to push for weakened job protections and scaled-back unemployment benefits.
Workfare came to serve as the main response to job loss. Outside of a few countries that still provide generous benefits to the unemployed, such as France, few workers can afford to remain unemployed for long. Job-losers tend to join young labour-market entrants in part-time, temporary or no-contract work.
In most countries, these “non-standard” workers have few legal protections and are economically precarious. They are forced to moderate their demands in slow-growing economies. Workers who are not protected by powerful unions or labor laws find it difficult to pressure employers to raise their wages or improve working conditions.
As long as underemployment persists, inequality is likely to intensify. An expanding gap between the growth of real wages and productivity levels has contributed to a 9% shift from labor income to capital income in the G20 countries over the past 50 years.
In sluggish economies periodically racked by economic crisis and austerity, it is easier to blame the resulting social deterioration on robots, or on vulnerable sections of the workforce such as immigrants, women, and racial or religious minorities, than to face its true causes.
Given the winding down of the industrial-growth engine – which has accompanied the spread of productive capacities around the world – restoring previously prevailing rates of economic growth will prove difficult if not impossible. Unless we find some way to share the work that remains, beggar-thy-neighbor politics really will tear our societies apart.
Aaron Benanav is a researcher in the social sciences at the University of Chicago. He is writing a book about the global history of unemployment. This is an abridged version of his New Left Review article on automation
Aaron Benanav future of work
Automation and the future of work: Part 1
Automation and the future of work: Part 2
As economic growth decelerates, job creation slows, and it is this, not technology-induced job destruction, which is depressing the global demand for labour.
it is crucial that we reconceive of the present situation as marked not by the imminent arrival of mass unemployment, as automation theorists suggest, but by continuously rising under-employment.
we are heading towards a ‘good job-less future’ rather than a ‘jobless’ one: ‘workers have to keep working in order to feed themselves, so they take any jobs in sight’, even those offering poor pay, limited hours or terrible working conditions. Automation theorists interpret this as a consequence of growing technological unemployment, occurring somewhere offstage. In reality, rapid automation of production is hardly taking place at all—offstage or anywhere else
Yet only about 17 per cent of the global labour force works in manufacturing, with an additional 5 per cent in mining, transportation and utilities. The vast majority of the world’s under-employed workers therefore end up finding jobs in the highly heterogeneous service sector, which accounts for between 70 and 80 per cent of total employment in high-income countries, and the majority of workers in Iran, Nigeria, Turkey, the Philippines, Mexico, Brazil and South Africa.
The post-industrial economy we have inherited—now finally on a world scale—is, however, rather unlike the one whose emergence Daniel Bell first predicted in 1973: instead of an economy of researchers, tennis instructors and Michelin-rated chefs, ours is predominantly a world of side-street barbers, domestic servants, fruit-cart vendors and Walmart shelf-stackers.
the key to explaining this phenomenon is not the rapid pace of job destruction in specific branches, if it occurs, but the absence of a corresponding pace of job creation in the wider economy.
The main explanation for that is not rising productivity-growth rates, as the automation theorists claim, but inadequate output demand, due to the proliferation of industrial capacities across the world, an associated over-accumulation of capital, and a consequent downshift in rates of manufacturing expansion and economic growth overall. These remain the primary economic and social causes of the slack in the labour market that is wracking workers across the world.
The basic pattern of employment growth in services, described by Princeton economist William Baumol in the early 1960s, helps explain why under-employment in the sector is such a major feature of today’s economy—and why the automation theorists’ account falls askew.26 Baumol explained rising service-sector employment by pointing out that service occupations see lower rates of mechanization and productivity growth than the industrial sector. If demand for services increases, employment does too, and by almost as much (Figures 2 and 3)—unlike in manufacturing, where most output growth is generated by rising productivity rather than expanding employment
Service-sector demand must thus rely on income effects for its expansion—the growth of demand for services depends on the growth of incomes across the wider economy. This means that as the rate of overall economic growth slows with the dilapidation of the industrial growth-engine, the pace of service-sector employment growth should slacken, too.
But despite advanced economies growing more slowly, service-sector employment expanded quickly in certain low-wage, precarious occupations. It is at this point that logics of under-employment come into play. It turned out to be possible to lower the prices of these services—and so to expand demand for them—without raising levels of productivity, by paying workers less, or suppressing the growth of their wages relative to whatever meagre increases in their productivity were achieved over time.28 The same principle applies to self-employed workers, who, by offering to work for less, are able to create demand for their labour at the expense of their incomes. The service sector is the choice site for job creation through super-exploitation because the wages of service workers make up a relatively large share of their final price.
As inequality intensifies, opportunities for super-exploitation expand; it begins to make sense for richer households to hire the poor to perform tasks they would otherwise do for themselves—solely because of the extreme difference in the price of their respective labours.
Given this context, in which a capital strike would quickly push the economy deeply into crisis, we need to set our sights higher: on the conquest of production. Taking the power to control investment decisions away from capitalists and rendering the capital strike inoperative forms an essential precondition of our collective progress toward a post-scarcity future.
Harbouring a vision is crucial to reviving an emancipatory project today, not least because its future realization seems so far away. Nineteenth-century socialists knew they were far from achieving their goals, but they were nevertheless possessed by an idea of a freer future which animated their struggle. As late as 1939, Brecht could still write: ‘our goal lay far in the distance / it was clearly visible’.49 Few would say that today. Not only are we living in an era of stubbornly entrenched neoliberalism, provoking angry ethno-nationalisms and climate-induced catastrophes of growing frequency and scale, we also lack a concrete idea of a real alternative. Centralized state planning turned out to be both economically irrational and ecologically destructive, filling warehouses with shoddy products and proving susceptible to autocratic bureaucratization. European welfare states and Keynesian full-employment policies proved unable to adapt to a context of slowing growth and ongoing deindustrialization
not the free giving of money, as the automation theorists have it, but rather the abolition of private property and monetary exchange. One of the reasons for their relinquishing this key objective is that they tend to begin from the wrong transitional questions: starting from the assumption that full automation will be achieved, they go on to ask how we would need to transform society in order to save humanity from the mass joblessness it would cause and create a world of generalized human dignity.
But it is possible to reverse this thought experiment, so that instead of presupposing a fully automated economy and imagining the possibilities for a better and freer world created out of it, we begin from a world of generalized human dignity and then consider the implications for technical change in working to realize that world.
Judith Butler Paris Nov 14 2015
“Mourning becomes the law”—Judith Butler from Paris
Saturday 14th November, 2015
I am in Paris and passed near the scene of killing on Boulevard Beaumarchais on Friday evening. I had dinner ten minutes from another target. Everyone I know is safe, but many people I do not know are dead or traumatized or in mourning. It is shocking and terrible. Today the streets were populated in the afternoon, but empty in the evening. The morning was completely still.
It seems clear from the immediate discussions after the events on public television that the “state of emergency”, however temporary, does set a tone for an enhanced security state. The questions debated on television include the militarization of the police (how to “complete” the process),, the space of liberty, and how to fight “Islam” – an amorphous entity. Hollande tried to look manly when he declared this a war, but one was drawn to the imitative aspect of the performance so could not take the discourse seriously.
And yet, buffoon that he is, he is acting as the head of the army now. The state/army distinction dissolves in the light of the state of emergency. People want to see the police, and want a militarized police to protect them. A dangerous, if understandable, desire. The beneficient aspects of the special powers accorded the sovereign under the state of emergency included giving everyone free taxi rides home last night, and opening the hospitals to everyone affected, also draws them in. There is no curfew, but public services are curtailed, and no demonstrations are allowed. Even the “rassemblements” (gatherings) to grieve the dead were technically illegal. I went to one at the Place de la Republique and the police would announce that everyone must disperse, and few people obeyed. That was for me a brief moment of hopefulness.
Those commentators that seek to distinguish among sorts of Muslim communities and political views are considered to be guilty of pursuing “nuances.” Apparently,the enemy has to be comprehensive and singular to be vanquished, and the difference between muslim and jihadist and ISIL becomes more difficult to discern in public discourse. The pundits were sure who the enemy was before ISIL took responsiblity for the attacks.
It was interesting to me that Hollande announced three days of mourning as he tightened security controls – another way to read the title of Gillian Rose’s book, “mourning becomes the law.” Are we grieving or are we submitting to increasingly militarized state power and suspended democracy? How does the latter work more easily when it is sold as the former? The public days of mourning are to be three, but the state of emergency can last up to twelve days before the national assembly has to approve it.
But also, the state explains it must now restrict liberties in order to defend liberty – that seems to be a paradox that does not bother the pundits on television. Yes, the attacks were quite clearly aimed at iconic scenes of daily freedom in France: the cafe, the rock concert venue, the football stadium. In the rock concert hall, there was apparently a diatribe by one of the attackers committing the 89 brutal assasinations, blaming France for failing to intervene in Syria (against Assad’s regime), and blaming the west for its intervention in Iraq (against the Baathist regime). So, not a position, if we can call it that, against western intervention per se.
There is also a politics of names: ISIS, ISIL, Daesh. France will not say “etat islamique” since that would be to recognize the state. They also want to keep “Daesh” as a term, so it is an Arabic word that does not enter into French. In the meantime, that organization took responsibility for the killings, claiming that they were retribution for all the aerial bombing that has killed muslims on the soil of the Caliphate. The choice of the rock concert as a target – a sight for assasinations, actually – was explained: it hosted “idolatry” and “a festival of perversion.” I wonder how they come upon the term “perversion.” Sounds like they were reading outside of their field.
The presidential candidates have chimed in: Sarkozy is now proposing detention camps, explaining that it is necessary to be arresting those who are suspected of having ties to jihadists. And Le Pen is arguing for “expulsion”, having only recently called new migrants “bacteria.” That one of the killers of Syrian origin clearly entered France through Greece may well become a reason for France to consolidate its nationalist war against migrants.
My wager is that the discourse on liberty will be important to track in the coming days and weeks, and that it will have implications for the security state and the narrowing versions of democracy before us. One version of liberty is attacked by the enemy, another version is restricted by the state. The state defends the version of liberty attacked as the very heart of France, and yet suspends freedom of assembly (“the right to demonstrate”) in the midst of its mourning and prepares for an even more thorough militarization of the police. The political question seems to be, what version of the right-wing will prevail in the coming elections? And what now becomes a permissable right-wing once le Pen becomes the “center”. Horrific, sad, and foreboding times, but hopefully we can still think and speak and act in the midst of it.
Mourning seems fully restricted within the national frame. The nearly 50 dead in Beirut from the day before are barely mentioned, and neither are the 111 in Palestine killed in the last weeks alone, or the scores in Ankara. Most people I know describe themseves as “at an impasse”, not able to think the situation through. One way to think about it may be to come up with a concept of transversal grief, to consider how the metrics of grievability work, why the cafe as target pulls at my heart in ways that other targets cannot. It seems that fear and rage may well turn into a fierce embrace of a police state. I suppose this is why I prefer those who find themselves at an impasse. That means that this will take some time to think through. It is difficult to think when one is appalled. It requires time, and those who are willing to take it with you – something that has a chance of happening in an unauthorized “rassemblement.”
Judith
Butler review of Parting Ways
Judith Butler 2012 Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism reviewed by Lisa Bhungalia right here
Those familiar with Butler’s scholarship will see a continuation of themes developed in her earlier work on gender and sexuality (Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) and Bodies That Matter (1993)) and her more recent ruminations on war and violence (Precarious Life (2004) and Frames of War (2010)). Across these earlier works, Butler has maintained a critical eye to the ways in which categories are constructed and identities policed – a project she extends to Jewish identity in this latest work on Jewishness, Zionism, and Palestine/Israel.
Parting Ways originally began as a Jewish critique of state violence. However, it soon evolved into something much more: a political vision for the future of Israel/Palestine. Butler’s vision draws inspiration from Edward Said’s reflections on diaspora and exile in Freud and the Non-European and Reflections on Exile, in which he asks what kind of ethos and politics might be forged through a consideration of the diasporic character of both Jewish and Palestinian history.
Drawing on Said’s insights, both Jewish and Palestinian identities, Butler argues, are constituted by their relation to alterity, ‘a condition of having been scattered, having lived among those to whom one does not clearly belong’ (Butler 2012, page 214). Butler is careful, as was Said, not to render these histories as synonymous or equal; rather she asks what kind of ethics and political community might emerge from a consideration of their overlap?
Butler conclusion forgiveness pardon (3)
Butler, Judith. “On Cruelty.” Rev. of The Death Penalty: Vol. I, by Jacques Derrida, translated by Peggy Kamuf. London Review of Books 36.14 (2014): 31-33. 9 July 2014
Following Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’, Derrida underscores the toxic intimacy between crime and its legal remedy.
The law distinguishes between legitimate and illegitimate forms of the death penalty, establishing the procedures by which that distinction is made.
It also establishes the grounds on which the state can inflict deadly violence either in war or through such legal instruments as the death penalty.
The death penalty, for Derrida, considered as a form of legal violence, closes down the distinction between justice and vengeance: justice becomes the moralised form that vengeance assumes. Continue reading “Butler conclusion forgiveness pardon (3)”
Butler Freud aggression love thy neighbour (2)
Butler, Judith. “On Cruelty.” Rev. of The Death Penalty: Vol. I, by Jacques Derrida, translated by Peggy Kamuf. London Review of Books 36.14 (2014): 31-33. 9 July 2014
Beyond the Pleasure Principle calls into question the exclusive operation of the pleasure principle as the organising principle of psychic life. Are there modes of destructiveness that can’t be explained by the pleasure principle?
The death drive emerges as a way of explaining repetition compulsions that fail to establish any kind of sustainable mastery. Continue reading “Butler Freud aggression love thy neighbour (2)”
Butler Nietzsche morality punishment (1)
Butler, Judith. “On Cruelty.” Rev. of The Death Penalty: Vol. I, by Jacques Derrida, translated by Peggy Kamuf. London Review of Books 36.14 (2014): 31-33. 9 July 2014
‘Whence comes this bizarre, bizarre idea,’ Jacques Derrida asks, reading Nietzsche on debt in On the Genealogy of Morals, ‘this ancient, archaic idea, this so very deeply rooted, perhaps indestructible idea, of a possible equivalence between injury and pain? Continue reading “Butler Nietzsche morality punishment (1)”
butler 2012
TDR: Special Consortium Issue: Precarity and Performance, 56.4 (Winter 2012)
And who can afford to live out a life in which one’s labor is disposable and the worth of one’s knowledge unrecognizable by prevailing market standards? The result is surely rage. But perhaps we can ask more precisely, how to make sense of bodies who assemble on the street, or
who occupy buildings, or who find themselves gathering in public squares or along the routes that cross city centers?
In some ways, the question is too large, since there are all kinds of assemblies: the revolutionary assemblies in Tunisia and Egypt, the demonstrations against educational cuts and the emerging hegemony of neoliberalism in higher education that we have seen in Athens, Rome, London, Wisconsin, and Berkeley, to name but a few. And then there are the demonstrations that are without immediate demands, such as Occupy Wall Street.
Then, of course, there are the riots in the UK, which are also without explicit demands but have a political significance that cannot be underestimated when we consider the extent of poverty and unemployment among those who were looting.
When people take to the streets together, they form something of a body politic, and even if that body politic does not speak in a single voice — even when it does not speak at all or make any claims — it still forms, asserting its presence as a plural and obdurate bodily life.
What, then, is the political significance of assembling as bodies, stopping traffic or claiming attention, or moving not as stray and separated individuals, but as a social movement of some kind?
This assembling of bodies does not have to be organized from on high (the Leninist presumption), nor does it need to have a single message (the logocentric conceit) to exercise a certain performative force in the public domain. The “we are here” that translates that collective bodily presence might be re-read as “we are still here,” meaning: “we have not yet been disposed of.”
Such bodies are precarious and persistent, which is why I think we have always to link precarity with forms of social and political agency where that is possible. When the bodies of those deemed “disposable” assemble in public view, they are saying, “We have not slipped quietly into the shadows of public life; we have not become the glaring absence that structures your public life.”
In a way, the collective assembling of bodies is an exercise of the popular will, and a way of asserting, in bodily form, one of the most basic presuppositions of democracy, namely, that political and public institutions are bound to represent the people, and to do so in ways that establish equality as a presupposition of social and political existence.
So when those institutions become structured in such a way that certain populations become disposable, are interpellated as disposable, deprived of a future, of education, of stable and fulfilling work, of even knowing what space one can call a home, then surely the assemblies fulfill another function, not only the expression of justifiable rage, but the assertion in their very social organization, of principles of equality in the midst of precarity.
Bodies on the street are precarious — they are exposed to police force, and sometimes endure physical suffering as a result. But those bodies are also obdurate and persisting, insisting on their continuing and collective “thereness” and, in these recent formations, organizing themselves without hierarchy, and so exemplifying the principles of equal treatment that they are demanding of public institutions.
In this way, those bodies enact the message, performatively, even when they sleep in public, or when they organize collective methods for cleaning the grounds they occupy, as happened in Tahrir and on Wall Street. If there is a “we” who assembles there, at that precise space and time, there is also a “we” that forms across the media, and that calls for the demonstrations and broadcasts its events.
Some set of global connections is being articulated, a different sense of the global from the “globalized market.” And some set of values is being enacted in the form of a collective resistance: a defense of our collective precarity and persistence in the making of equality and the many-voiced and unvoiced ways of refusing to become disposable.
I think it may be important to keep active the relationship between the various meanings of the precarious that both Isabell and Jasbir have laid out: (1) precariousness, a function of our social vulnerability and exposure that is always given some political form, and precarity as differentially distributed, and so one important dimension of the unequal distribution of conditions required for continued life;
but also (2) precaritization as an ongoing process, so that we do not reduce the power of precarious to single acts or single events. Precaritization allows us to think about the slow death that happens to targeted or neglected populations over time and space. And it is surely a form of power without a subject, which is to say that there is no one center that propels its direction and destruction.
If we only stayed with “precaritization,” I am not sure that we could account for the structure of feeling that Lauren has brought up. And if we decided to rally under the name of “the precarious” we might be making a social and political condition into an identity, and so cloaking some way that that form of power actually works.
So maybe precarious is what we feel, or would rather not feel, and its analysis has to be linked to the impetus to become impermeable, as so often happens within zones of military nationalism and rhetorics of security and self-defense.
But it seems also important to call “precarious” the bonds that support life, those that should be structured by the condition of mutual need and exposure that should bring us to forms of political organization that sustain living beings on terms of equality. It is not just that a single person is precarious by virtue of being a body in the world.
Although that is surely true, since accidents happen and some of us are then snuffed out or injured irreversibly. What seems more important than that form of existential individualism is the idea that a “bond” is flawed or frayed, or that it is lost or irrecoverable.
And we see this very prominently when, for instance, Tea Party politicians revel in the idea that those individuals who have failed to “take responsibility” for their own health care may well face death and disease as a result.
In other words, at such moments, a social bond has been cut or destroyed in a way that seeks to deny a shared precariousness and the very particular ethos and politics that ideally should follow from that — one that underscores global interdependence and objects to the radically unequal distribution of precarity (and grievability).
So I want to caution against an existential reading and insist that what is at stake is a way of rethinking social relationality. We can make the broad existential claim, namely, that everyone is precarious, and this follows from our social existence as bodily beings who depend upon one another for shelter and sustenance and who, therefore, are at risk of statelessness, homelessness, and destitution under unjust and unequal political conditions.
As much as I am making such a claim, I am also making another, namely, that our precarity is to a large extent dependent upon the organization of economic and social relationships, the presence or absence of sustaining infrastructures and social and political institutions.
In this sense, precarity is indissociable from that dimension of politics that addresses the organization and protection of bodily needs. Precarity exposes our sociality, the fragile and necessary dimensions of our interdependency.
Whether explicitly stated or not, every political effort to manage populations involves a tactical distribution of precarity, more often than not articulated through an unequal distribution of precarity, one that depends upon dominant norms regarding whose life is grievable and worth protecting, and whose life is ungrievable, or marginally or episodically grievable — a life that is, in that sense, already lost in part or in whole, and thus less worthy of protection and sustenance.
In my own view, then, we have to start from this shared condition of precarity (not as existential fact, but as a social condition of political life) in order to refute those normative operations, pervasively racist, that decide in advance who counts as human and who does not.
My point is not to rehabilitate humanism, but rather to struggle for a conception of ethical obligation that is grounded in precarity.
No one escapes the precarious dimension of social life — it is, we might say, our common non-foundation. Nothing “founds” us outside of a struggle to establish bonds that sustain us.
I thought to take up this question of the human since references to precarity sometimes rely on ideals of humanization and sometimes actually decenter the human itself. It is always possible to say that the affective register where precarity dwells is something like dehumanization.
And yet, we know that such a word relies on a human/animal distinction that cannot and should not be sustained. Indeed, if we call for humanization and struggle against “bestialization” then we affirm that the bestial is separate from and subordinate to the human, something that clearly breaks our broader commitments to rethinking the networks of life.
On the one hand, I want to be able to say that the “human” operates differentially, as Fanon clearly thought it did ([1952] 2008; [1961] 2005), such that some are humanized and others are not, and that this inequality must be opposed. But the critical task is to find a way to oppose that inequality without embracing anthropocentrism. So we have to rethink the human in light of precarity, showing that there is no human without those networks of life within which human life is but one sort of life.
Otherwise, we end up breaking off the human from all of its sustaining conditions (and in that way become complicit with the process of precaritization itself ). So the point is not to develop a conception of the human that would include every possible person first because such conceptions come to operate as exclusionary norms, and they are based on this breaking off of the human from its own material need, and the broader fields of life in which that need is implicated.
To think critically, usefully, about how the norm of the human is constructed and maintained requires that we take up a position outside of its terms, not as the nonhuman or even the anti-human, but rather precisely through thinking forms of sociality and interdependence, no matter how difficult, that are irreducible to uniquely human forms of life and so cannot be adequately addressed by any definition of human nature or the human individual. To speak about what is living in human life is already to admit that human ways of living are bound up with nonhuman modes of life.
Indeed, the connection with nonhuman life is indispensable to what we call human life. In Hegelian terms, if the human cannot be the human without the inhuman, then the inhuman is not only essential to the human, but is therefore the essence of the human. The point is not to simply invert the relations, but rather to gather and hold this merely apparent paradox together in a new thought of “human life” in which its component parts, “human” and “life,” never fully coincide with one another. In other words, if we have to hold onto this term “human life” in order to describe and oppose those situations in which “human life” is jeopardized, it will have to be done in such a way that the very conjunction — human life — will on occasion seek to hold together two terms that repel one another, or that work in divergent directions.
Human life is never the entirety of life, and life can never fully define the human — so whatever we might want to call human life will inevitably consist of a negotiation with this tension. Perhaps the human is the name we give to this very negotiation.
What seems to follow is this: while it is important to ask, Whose life qualifies as a human life?, we have also to ask the inverse question: What of human life is inevitably nonhuman?
If there is a human life that does not qualify as human, that has to be marked and opposed, then the question becomes: Through what modes of sociality is that opposition articulated?
And how do those modes of oppositional sociality redefine and resituate the human in light of animal and organic networks of life? There has to be a way to find and forge a set of bonds that can produce alliances over and against this grid of power that differentially allocates recognizability and uses the “human” as a term through which to institute inequality and unrecognizability.
The beginning of such alliances can be found in ethical formulations such as these: even if my life is not destroyed in war, something of my life is destroyed in war when other lives are destroyed in war, and when living processes and organisms are also destroyed in war. Since the existence of other lives, understood as any mode of life that exceeds me, is a condition of who I am, my life can make no exclusive claim on life (“I am not the only living thing”). At the same time, my own life is not every other life, and cannot be (“My life is not the same as other lives”).
In other words, to be alive is already to be connected with, dependent upon, what is living not only before and beyond myself, but before and beyond my humanness. No self and no human can live without this connection to a biological network of life that exceeds and includes the domain of the human animal.
This is why in opposing war, for example, one not only opposes the destruction of other human lives, but also the poisoning of the environment and the assault on living beings and a living world.
Ž critique of Butler October 2010
Žižek Penn Humanities Forum 13 Oct. 2010
pure surface, frozen image, positive ethical utopia of eternity, this image is real and at the same time virtual. Plato has to corected, a Platonic ideal is not deeper, just an ethical act when it occurs, this is eternity, this is the Real. The Real as virtual.
I am against the notion of Otherness Universal solidarity of struggle. India I had a wonderful time. I was in a taxi with my friend and the driver asked in his language to Ž’s friend … dirty joke as entry exchange of obscenity as moment of solidarity, we are not politically correct b.s., to have authenticate relation to other you need a surplus enjoyment, and then you can go on to talk seriously. I don’t understand my culture, I don’t understand yours, ditto for you, but we have a common universality of struggle. we are eternal. this is a sublime moment.
Real as virtual
flesh, blood veins, repuslive body of decay, we take recourse in decaying body in order to avoid fascination of the Real.
real that emerges in the guise of an illusory spectacle, this is what we deny when we cut up chickens on stage, directly address the audience etc.
There is nothing transgressive talking about veins, shit underneath, aging bodies, gas, there is nothing sublime going on here.
Ethical Experience and critique of Judith Butler
This dimension of eternity is necessary to supply the big motive of pomo ethics, the precarious fragility of human being
caught in decentred representations, this precarious state of subjectivity which for Butler and Levinas accounts for zero level of all ethics.
The others face makes an unconditional demand on me. The encounter with the other which opens up the space for discourse, the Real of a violent encounter which throws me off my existence as a simple human animal.
Crux of the difference between Žižek and Butler
Desire is desire of the other.
dimension of ethical in psychoanalytic experience.
In my unconditional responsibility, I assume supremacy over the other (acts of charity, bombard us with images of starving children). Butler explains which faces are worthy of grief and which are not, the pictures dying of napalm, helped end Vietnam war. But Ž says images of sick and starving children, fragility of other staring back at you has the obverse, the moment the other doesn’t want to play this role, we all love this weak other, like Starbucks ads say we can save by buying a capuccino, but the minute they the other organize, they become terrorists. Who cares about computers when kids are starving in Africa says Bill Gates. This is an effort at depoliticization. Forget about politics and ideology, and get together, business and charity and don’t think.
Starbucks is today the example of Levinasian ethical paradigm
This vulnerable precarious other
Žižek goes into the animal that I am. Another gaze excluded by Levinas, the gaze of a wounded suffering animal.
dfas
Monstrosity of the HUMAN
What are we for animals? This is not New Age b.s. If you turn around the perspective and ask simply not what does it mean the gaze of the frightened animal, but what do you see in the animals gaze, you see your own monstrosity, this is what philosophers don’t want to talk about. What? DEATH DRIVE.
Kant: Man is an animal that needs a master, wild irrational excess of violent freedom in man, which animals don’t have, which is why animals don’t need education, it is nature “turned against itself”an excess of wild freedom.
What were the first Christians in the eyes of the Jewish establishment. What kind of monsters were they?
Locate properly our Monstrosity
So called fundamentalists are not egotists, but are ready to sacrifice their lives, same with capitalists, MEME, spreads like a computer virus, it programs its own retransmission, we humans are nonetheless are unwitting victims of a thought contagion. Daniel Dennett too. we are dealing with a parasite that occupies the individual and uses it for its own purposes. An idea can spread even if in the long term it can only bring destruction to its bearers. CAPITAL: like a meme, they use us to reproduce and multiply itself, the productive force, the capitalist process of production is development of productive forces, capitalism is NOT sustained by greed of capitalists, greed is subordinated to impersonal power of capital. What we need is MORE not less EGOTISM. In Lacanian terms, individual greed and striving of capital to expand is difference between DESIRE AND DRIVE. Krugman says most of would still follow the herd even knowing there would be a breakdown. Memetic functioning of capitalist drive.
Fetishist Disavowal
Marx’s key insight remains valid Freedom is not located in political sphere proper, are human rights respected, is there free judiciary etc. The key to freedom for Marx is apolitical network of social relations from market to family, a change in social relations which appear apolitical, a change that can’t be done through elections in narrow sense, we don’t vote about who owns what, about relations in factory. Radical changes in this domain have to be done outside legal sphere. This limitation of legal democratic approach was shown in Obama’s reaction to BP oil spill. Sue them! it is all held within a narrow legalistic frame. The true task is not COMPENSATION, but to change situation so that they won’t be in situation to cause damage
They tell you about global warming and then you go outside and see the sun and the birds chirping and you say “my god can this be true”
Humanity should get ready to live in a more plastic nomadic way. Large population migrations will be necessary, desertification, global warming, large population movements who will organize it. Trans-state global mechanism to do it.
Sometimes the impossible happens: The Act You do something which within the existing ideological universe appears impossible, but while doing it it creates its own possibility, through the act itself it becomes possible. This is what we need.
Future: continuation of the present, full actualization of the tendencies already here.
The ultimate horizon of the future, some ecological breakdown, zero-point, a virtual attractor to which our reality if left to itself tends. We have to break with this through acts, there is no future in future, there is something in avenir.
Avenir: what is to come, a break with the present
We should adopt catastrophe as virtual point. Bring logic of existing system to end, there is ecological breakdown. OK this is our destiny, but we can indefinitely postpone it, and slowly undermine it. Admit the catastrophe as a destiny, but not as natural necessity, but as symbolic destiny, this does not mean it will really arrive, it is a dialectical point, destiny is inevitable, but what we can change is the inevitability of destiny. If everything is predestined why work, why not sit and masterbate, no if there is a concept marxists should take from theology it is predestination. It is predestined, we are not free within this predestiny but we are free to change destiny itself.
Every new work of art changes the entire past. Kafka created his own predecessors.
Commodity Fetishism
butler vulnerability
Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance: Feminism & Social Change
Women Creating Change
Istanbul Workshop, September 16-19, 2013
Co-directors: Judith Butler and Zeynep Gambetti
There is always something both risky and true in claiming that women are especially vulnerable. The claim can be taken to mean that women have an unchanging and defining vulnerability, and that kind of argument makes the case for paternalistic protection. If women are especially vulnerable, then they seek protection, and it becomes the responsibility of the state or other paternal powers to provide that protection. On the model, feminist activism not only petitions paternal authority for special dispensations and protections, but affirms that inequality of power situates women in a powerless position and, by implication, men in a more powerful one, or it invests state structures with the responsibility for facilitating the achievement of feminist goals. In yet other instances, women struggle to establish practices (self-defense) and institutions (battered women’s shelters) that seek to provide protection without enlarging paternalistic powers. Continue reading “butler vulnerability”