Judith Butler on Demonstrating Precarity

welcome to this podcast interview for los angeles review books my name is Armand de Booga and the critical theory philosophy section editor for the review I'm here today with Professor Judith Butler she's Maxine Elliot professor in the department of comparative literature and the program of critical theory at the University of California Berkeley Judy welcome thank you you're in LA to give four lectures for public lectures they're assembled under the title be sure I get this let me make sure I get this right demonstrating precarity vulnerability embodiment and resistance readers of your work I think we'll hear an echo here of the title of one of your recent books precarious life the powers of mourning and violence could you talk maybe a little bit about how you arrived from bakari's life at the topic of these public lectures mm-hmm well my public lectures tend to be concerned with the idea of assembly public assembly and what it means when bodies come together to protest or to assert certain kinds of demands or to object to certain social conditions and in the last years I've been particularly interested in demonstrations against precarity or sometimes in the European context demonstrations against austerity they are obviously referencing fiscal policies that produce rather stark economic consequences for a vast number of people in general the right of public assembly which has been with us for some time and I think was originally posited as a as a right on the part of laborers to assemble and decide whether or not they wanted to be part of a union or to assemble to decide to decide and negotiate their wages that right of assembly is has often been understood as an abstract right without thinking about the that it it requires bodies to come together and it's a right that is our right about that presupposes mobility the freedom to gather and the freedom to speak rights of assembly struck me as different from rights of association or indeed rights of free expression they fundamentally involve the body and in a you know in a collective embodied set of acts your first lecture which was titled from performativity to precarity it reached even farther back I think into your your over you went all the way back there to your classic text gender trouble feminism and the subversion of identity how did a theorist of gender end up writing about public assemblies uh-huh well um I think back in 1988-89 when I was writing gender trouble I was certainly interested in social movements and I was watching gay lesbian movement emerge in certain forms and take take particular shape a in relationship to what was then understood as an hiv/aids crisis in the United States and and in some other places as well the UK France and I and yet the the theory of gender performativity that emerged in a way in the course of those reflections was very often understood to be a theory that focused on individual acts or individual acts by which you perform a gender or take on a gender and some people thought it was a highly volitional view that is to say that we're uh turley free to take on whatever gender we want and and also that it was an individualistic view so you're free to take on your gender and I'm free to take on mine and that's part of our individual liberty so that was a little distressing that there was that one that was way of reading the text I understood why people might read it that way but I was nevertheless somewhat distressed so in the years that followed I tried to return to the theory of performativity in order to show its social and political dimensions more carefully it's it's it's it's true that performativity broadly understood is a comes from a theory of language that talks about how language makes things happen how certain categories can bring social realities into being or produce certain kinds of effects it's a theory that that in some ways underscores the the powerful effects of discourse but there's a question how is it that we embody discourses especially the discourses of gender and what can we do what kind of agency do we have in relationship to the categories that inhabit us and that we in turn and have it so for me thinking about what happens when we act in common what happens when we act in concert on events views have been important for me as I try to think about what what performative what performative action looks like when people undertake that in common and and and demonstrations are of course a key way in which that happens when people are demonstrating about precarity for instance it's not just that they get up and say we're against free carroty they are also embodied creatures in public space who are calling attention to the embodied character of their lives this is a body that doesn't have shelter or this is a body that deserves shelter this is a body that ought not to be hungry this is a body that ought to have some sense of future about its work or its possibilities for flourishing in other words the body is not just the vehicle for the expression of a political view but it's a it's a it's a it's art its common corporeal predicament of those who need to be supported by proper infrastructure and proper social services and proper economic conditions and prospects so that struck me as a and another way of making this point and one that I guess for obvious reasons is important to me as it is to I think many other people at this point you seem to thereby reverse a move that is made in Michel Foucault's work where he says at some point in history sexuality he has this famous call for us to cut off the head of the king and instead for us in our analysis of power look elsewhere who's my political issues to feel the sexuality and race and it seems like gender trouble very much came from there in a certain extent to a certain extent you know we were also very critical is reading a packaging about bands and so forth but then now the concern with sovereignty seems to be coming back in your work is that a fair characterization always Foucault too quick and calling on us to abandon sovereignty as head no I think Foucault is perfectly right but I think I'm probably meaning something very different from the concept of sovereignty that he had in mind I mean the sovereignty of the King is of course the the sovereignty of the the unified figure the human figure that stands for state power and that is state power and of course it's it's possible to model state sovereignty on on the implicit or explicit figure of the king but when you have when you talk about popular sovereignty it seems very different the people is not up we can't say that the the people who exercise a popular sovereignty are a unified subject in my view they are not a unified subject there's no way they're unified they're discordant and cacophonous a set of voices and demands that nevertheless can coalesce in the exercise of popular sovereignty so one question is whether the idea of even in popular sovereignty is so wedded to the idea of a unified master subject like the king that we can't use it it's too contaminated by that history but what if we think about distributed sovereignty what if we think about shared sovereignty what do we think about divisible sovereignty it can simply be a way of naming that complex situation in which rights of political self-determination are exercised without there being a presumption of a unified subject who's exercising them and it's kind of sovereignty that kind of sovereignty of the people is preferable to notion of the multitude for example ordinance well I think you know um I mean surely the idea of the multitude is an important one and if one goes back to look at Spinoza's work on the theological and the political one finds a really interesting set of formulations and many people have including that word multitude many people have thought about it including obviously Tony Negri and Michael Hart but also Etienne belly Bihar and others and in some ways that are I think a little bit distinct from the heart Negri view the multitude I think is is a way of naming that complex effective political movement of people who are not a unified crowd and who are not a unified subject but I'm not sure that it leads us to the kinds of Democratic and parliamentary outcomes that I'm also interested in in other words I don't I don't necessarily want to understand assembled action or even the popular will as something that has nothing to do with representative democracy or parliamentary Changez of a significant kind for me that there's a kind of blurring between those lines I don't think I do think that though if we could talk about the will of the people I don't think it's ever fully represented by a particular parliamentary or state structure at the same time I don't think we can have a way of thinking about the legitimacy of state structure without there being some recourse to the popular will which is necessarily outside of it so those are complex interrelationships and I want to be able to think about those I'm not sure the multitude lets me do that right and so the will of the people is never fully exhausted by the representative structures that claim to voice it or concern themselves with it there I think that's a kind of necessity that Democratic theorists generally acknowledge that even when the people vote and put someone in office or they accept a rule or law or or even found a state the minute they actually start instituting their will the will becomes less complex and it vanishes to some degree there's always an abbreviation of the will in the in the effect of the will that that seems right but but the idea that the that there could be with withdraw withdrawal of the will of the people from from from rules from laws even from an entire state apparatus remains a really important one and I don't want us to to give up that notion that people do have the power to withdraw their consent and that that can have fairly powerful consequences and that seems to be none of this the correct way to put it in a kind of negative way withdrawal to build a grouping people I don't know if you'll remember this but after your second talk we had a conversation with the audience in which someone was bringing up the jesuischarlie campaign that's been going on and we didn't really talk about this then but it seems to me that there's a problem that comes up there with the positive identification with Charlie like whereas one might want to withdraw from the terroristic act that was committed there and that doesn't necessarily I can't necessarily be equated with a positive identification with with with Charlie which might be offensive or problematic for many believers I don't know if you have any thoughts on that yes um well it's always curious to me why people think that identification or certain identification is the way to show solidarity you know it could be that when someone says just be shaggy that they mean it could have been me or I stand with him or they could simply be saying I think what happened to those who worked for the shiny Abdo the assassinations is absolutely wrong and I wish to make my views known and that's that's really a condemnation of what happened it's a condemnation of those assassinations I'm not sure that the language of identification is is always the best way to do that because I gather if one's going to be consistent one would be against the assassination of any group of people who are working in a political venue or who who are engaged in the formulation of of political or satirical work in other words why why why I mean it's important to mark that those associate SS assassinations were wrong but one needs to also say maybe in the same breath that all kinds of assassinations are wrong in other words to generalize the claim otherwise it seems like very particular istic term like I'm only against the assassination of people who worked at Charlie Hebdo no I mean no one wants to say that right we appeal to general principles the rights to be protected from assassination the moral condemnation of assassination and then the question is how how how expansive are our principles do they include all kinds of groups but they also include include Arabs working in France who are putting out publications some of whose views are not particularly welcome a is assassination the correct political response to views you disagree with No so you know trying to kind of generalize the claim seems very very important otherwise it seems like one's making a cultural identification of a certain kind and suggesting that those people who belong to that identifiable cultural affiliation ought not to be assassinated but really no one should be assassinated although this resonates to what you said in the New York Times interview that's been doing the rounds around all lives matter versus black lives matter yeah and you know we must in a way universalize a claim against all assassinations but then when we're talking about all eyez matter obviously there seems to be important to bring out that well you know not not all eyes seem to matter or black lives seem to be treated different yes there it's but there still I would say an aspiration toward the universal and that peace in other words black lives tend not to matter when police who kill unarmed black men are exonerated black lives should matter they should matter as much as any other life matters actually all lives should matter equally we should be radical egalitarians when it comes to the question of whose lives matter and yet we fail in that a Galit aryan project we fail to universalize that claim time and again because we have very specific cultural ideas of what a valuable life so if we say that only certain kinds of lives can be publicly grieved or the assassination of certain kinds of lives should be publicly condemned but other lives can remain unremarked or perhaps the loss of those lives are not so important or maybe they deserved it anyway whatever that moral confusion is that pervades responses such as those they they suggest that we actually do have cultural pre prejudices we have cultural presuppositions about what a valuable life might be and what a grievable life might be so in the same way that I'm saying in the French context let's make sure in saying just we shall ye that we're not saying those of us who come through the traditional French republicanism hang together and and we deserve not to be assassinated for furthering the the views of Voltaire or the tradition of Voltaire I mean of course that's right but it's also right that those lives from that tradition should matter equally to any other set of lies including lives that don't come through that debt tradition so one needs to kind of be attentive I think to the cultural prejudices that inform our ideas of which lives finally matter right and so I think some of the of this reflection happens in your work or at least in the public lectures around this notion we to people but evel's I've also seen it happening your work around the notion of the human I wanted to ask you a little bit about a notion that you you mentioned in frames of war I think it's in the chapter titled torture and the ethics of photography where you talk at some point about the human as or you propose we think about the human as a differential norm could you talk a little bit about what you mean by that yeah notion there well first let me say this I mean I don't know I picked up a journal and there was an article on Butler's new humanism and I thought oh that's very funny I guess it was bound to happen oh and let's see why is that the case and then I thought oh it's because I'm willing to talk about the human as a category and we're supposed to be posthuman or we're supposed to have you know transcendence is a norm right the French will learn but still well um I think in fact there's no way to talk about the human outside of a field of power I suppose I'm still a proper Foucault Deanna in certain ways whenever we're talking about the human it seems we we have to ask which version of the human is at stake or how is it being circumscribed and through what exclusions and with what consequences I don't believe we can dig deep and find the ontological version of the human that is absolutely true for all humans that's not my aspiration it's not even my expectation but I accept that the category of the human is a very powerful norm in it in influences so so much public debate and public policy and theoretical reflection that I don't think we can do without it indeed sometimes I I worry that those who treat it as I kind of contaminated contaminated by humanism we're too cool or too post-structuralist we can't talk about it they don't see that categories like this can be revisited we can ask about their genealogy we can ask how they've been formulated and through it occlusions and with what effects it seems like that's a critical approach to the category of the human I think a lot of that is happening now to in animal studies or in even in technology studies where's the human in relationship to the animal and technology can we can we differentiate perhaps the human is a set of relations among these various of terms human life and living process how do we think about human life in term in terms of in terms of living processes more generally I mean in each of these cases the human is not a self-sustaining category for sure it's it sustained through its betted missing a whole set of relationships but that gives us something to think about and that strikes me as as as very important and yet there are ideas of the human that insist upon its isolation its normativity it's ideal status and there again I'm concerned about which version of the human gets elevated to the status of the human as such and can we can we think more critically in genealogy in order to uncover those kinds of biases right that seems to be an important component also of your work on on israel-palestine well um I think probably you mean to say that the category of the human figures in my work on israel-palestine yes who is considered human and who falls within that count who is left outside of it and then you know what political ethical and political consequences yes come with that well I think one one thing we we find in war and I think we can find this in several scenarios of war is that especially those that are that are engaged by first world countries or in the name of Western civilization or European values that very often the fate of the human seems to be at stake in the war the enemies are are not are not exactly humans they are the threat to the human and the human that's being defended is is very often a very a culturally specific idea formed by ideas of manhood informed of ideas of reason and informed by ideas of autonomy of civilizational norms of of of cultural and educational formation and so in those cases it's very hard to talk about human rights or even crimes against humanity when those who have in fact inflicted those crimes don't understand the the beings they have destroyed the beings they have named or the beings they have displaced is within the community of the human so um you know I think that's a that's a way in which civilizational politics plays out in in war scenarios mm-hmm I think it's in your last lecture and you will talk a little bit about non-violence also I wanted to ask you about this in part because I remember years ago taking a seminar with you on Walter Benjamin's critique of violence that Cornell if he goes in school criticism and theory and you know wondering now so many years later you know does your thinking about non-violence still come out of that Benjamin essay how my work you've been doing on that what's how it might it have changed over time what do you mean by non-violence at exactly and when it comes to acts of resistance demonstrating in the streets and the economy the side of violence or nonviolent it's of course interesting that I'm actually teaching Benjamin's critique of violence again this semester at UC Berkeley so I guess I keep returning to that I think it was almost 10 years ago yes oh I keep returning I keep written and every time I read it I get something new I myself defend a principled account of non-violence I I do and and it's it's not easy to do especially in light of the kinds of challenges people present to me but um I think the world would be a poorer world if no one were defending non-violence so it's not it's not for that reason alone that I defend on violence but I do think that it's important too to think about what the justifications for violence are and what kinds of contradictions they entail so I think I have a longer argument about non-violence but I am very much in favor of non-violence what interests me in part and there are many things to say here but what interests me in part is how a non-violent action is sometimes called violent and even benjamine in that essay sometimes he seems to be naming what is violent and what is nonviolent but then if you look a bit closer you see that he's claiming that within the perspective of a particular legal regime any challenge to the legal regime is called violent and what's being opposed in in naming a resistance to the legal regime as a violent one is both the loss of the monopoly of violence the monopoly on violence that the state has so but but in fact many nonviolent resistance movements are called violent not because they use force or even have violent aims but because the their effects there say their dealer Jetta mating facts are understood to be destructive in some more amorphous sense but also I think protocols of non-violence on US campuses are no longer being recognized or honored by by police and the police are very often trained in military methods and not so much in non-violent civil disobedience protocols so several years ago now at Berkeley I guess about five years ago we saw people who were offering their their hands to be handcuffed in a in a very well-known gesture of non-violent civil disobedience who were thrown to the ground at you know at that moment people offering going going limp and offering themselves to be taken away or arrest who were nevertheless beaten in their limp state and so there's a kind of general question what has happened such that um police practices such as those no longer give credence to nonviolent civil disobedience no the police in those instances can say well those people were violent or they were a threat to security we talk about threat to security again we're in an amorphous kind of zone where yes a protest on a university campus say in opposition to tuition hikes or in opposition to increased privatization especially if you're at a public university that that might get large enough to cause a problem for security but it's not as if it's necessarily a violent one now some people enter into protests with violent aims and and do I think derail some of their most important directions by engaging in violence but I I must say I I don't think that's helpful or useful there's a lot more I could say about this but I don't know which direction you want to go and well I was actually thinking of wrapping it up you've been very focused generous with your time I did wonder just for the viewers the listeners will the LA lecture to be collected in a book these lectures are for the most part coming out in a book called notes toward a performative theory of assembly to be published by Harvard University Press later this year but the work on non-violence will appear separately I'm not quite sure where all right well thank you very much for thank you thank you

Channel: LA Review of Books

Views: 48,888

Keywords: LA, Review, of, Books, Judith Butler (Author), Charlie Hebdo (Newspaper), Ferguson (City/Town/Village), calarts, Precarity, Philosophy (Field Of Study), Michel Foucault (Author), Walter Benjamin (Author)

Id: 3OmCnyXbgwI

Length: 30min 15sec (1815 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 23 2015