Judith Butler's Istanbul Lecture: 'Freedom of Assembly, or Who are the People?' September, 2013

good afternoon everyone can you hear me hello can you now okay great good afternoon and uh welcome to ballast university at this lovely sunday afternoon uh we're very glad to host this event uh together with our good friends from uh istanbul foundation for culture and arts as part of the 13th istanbul biennial actually and also the columbia global centers turkey stumbled i'd like to thank a couple of people before i leave the floor to epec to to give introductions to judith and i have to also tell you that judith will be taking questions after the talk uh i'd like to particularly thank um big honest the director of istanbul daniel and puliar damji the curators for bringing us this nice event along with of course our good friends from columbia global center uh the uh judith probably needs no introduction to most of you here but we will actually do or repeat we'll do that introduction so that if anyone is not aware of what she does what she works on is is what we help dearly in this particular university for our we are celebrating 150th year so whatever she was she's really working on has been high on our both academic agenda and social agenda at this at this campus so uh i'll leave the floor to epec to give introductions and then i know everyone is really eager to hear from judith so i'll be very short on behalf of columbia university and columbia global centers turkey we're so happy and thrilled to have judith butler here with us she is a world-renowned scholar thinker and activist whose work has provoked and transformed the fields of gender sexual politics and political philosophy judith butler really needs no introduction but to mention her most important works gender trouble feminism and the subversion of identity undoing gender bodies that matter on the discursive limits of sex precarious life powers of violence and mourning who sings the nation state language politics belonging frames of war when is life grievable is critique secular and most recently parting ways jewishness and the critique of zionism she is also a well-known activist recognized for her outspoken and principled positions on gender and sexual politics and human rights as well as anti-war politics judith is based at the university of california berkeley where she is the co-director of the program of critical theory and we're fortunate to currently have her at columbia university as the wun sun tam melon visiting professor of the humanities here in istanbul for this week judith will be leading a workshop at the columbia global centers called women creating change on rethinking vulnerability and resistance feminism and social change we're delighted to have the opportunity to engage and interact with judith and all the scholars who will be at the workshop freedom of assembly or who are the people judith you couldn't have chosen a more timely topic given the turmoil and the social mobilizations occurring all around us here in turkey and elsewhere your remarks will no doubt offer us new and provocative ways about thinking on these appointment subjects please join me in welcoming judith butler to istanbul once again thank you so much i'm um i'm extremely pleased to be here and um i want to thank uh certainly my hosts here at bogazici university the columbia global centers and the istanbul biennale that's i'm i'm i'm most pleased to be here i'm especially uh pleased once again to be in conversation with um zaineb gambetti who will enter the stage a bit uh later um uh in the in in the in the in the afternoon evening wherever we are um i did want to talk to you about this topic but i'm aware that some people probably come here and they tell you who you are and what you're doing and what it means and i'm i'm not going to do that i stand to learn from you and one of the one of the interesting dimensions of working theoretically is that sometimes the theory doesn't seem to be located in place and time which means that when people take it up they they take it up and they give it a place in time where they change the theory depending on how it's appropriated in a given place and time of course theory is always generated from places and times even if it doesn't acknowledge that but i'm hoping that um that it might be considered at least for the purposes of our conversation here today as a kind of meeting point or a question of of uh translation of a site of translation between spaces and times and we'll see how well that works and when it doesn't work my guess is that that will be very important to learn okay there are many examples of people coming together forming a way of speaking as a collective demanding a change in policy exposing the absence of state legitimacy and or the dissolution of government tahrir square became emblematic of this assembly of bodies on the street in recent years they are the ones who first demanded the dissolution well actually after tunisia the the dissolution of the mubarak regime and then more recently in different configurations arrived on the street almas to object to various policies of the transitional regime to the appointment of officials known to have engaged in torture in the previous regime to the terms of a new constitution and to the dissolution of the court system by executive decree although tahir square became emblematic for contemporary democracy struggles although perhaps gaijin park will now become the emblem there is no there is now every reason to conclude that the so-called second revolution in egypt at least is a counter-revolution so at the heart of this emblem of popular assembly is a conflict a question a growing set of doubts let us assume that no one assembly can rightly become the basis for generalizations about all assemblies and that the efforts to associate a particular uprising or mobilization with democracy itself is a temptation as thrilling as it is erroneous can we even know who the we is who assembles in the street and asserts itself by speech or silence by action or steady in action by gesture or simply by gathering together as a group of bodies in public space visible audible tangible exposed existing persistent interdependent let us assume from the start that it is not by way of a particular and punctual speech act that a group comes together as a people although we often think that the declarative speech act by which we the people consolidates its popular sovereignty is one that issues from such an assembly it is perhaps more appropriate to say that the assembly is already speaking before it utters any words that by coming together it is already an enactment of popular will and that this is something other than being a single and unified subject who must declare its will through a vocalization the we voiced in language is already enacted by the assam by the assembly of bodies their gestures and movements their vocalizations their ways of acting in concert to cite hana arad to act in concert does not mean to act in conformity it may be that people are moving or speaking in several directions at once or even at cross purposes and it does not mean that the people speak the exact same words although sometimes that happens in a chant or in a verbal relay sometimes the people act by way of their collective silence or their ironic use of language their humor and even their mockery taking up and taking over a language they seek to derail from its usual ends and perhaps zainab will talk to us a little bit about that later so already there are two points i want to underscore the first is that the actions by which people assemble and assert themselves to be a people may be spoken or enacted in another way the second is simply that we have to be able to think of such acts as plural action presupposing presupposing a plurality of bodies who enact their convergent purposes in ways that do not require strict conformity to a single kind of acting or to a single kind of claim at issue for us will be the question of how politics changes when the idea of abstract rights vocally claimed by individuals gives way to a plurality of embodied actors who enact their claims sometimes through language sometimes not let us consider then how we might in light of this shift in framework understand freedom of assembly in what sense is it a right and how is it claimed as a right what does it presuppose about who we are and who we might be the right to exercise the freedom of assembly sometimes understood as the freedom of association is now well done is by now well documented in international law the international labor organization makes explicit that rights to assembly or associational rights are tied to the rights of collective bargaining this means that people assemble in order to con in order to negotiate the conditions of work including demands for safety job security protections against exploitation but also the right to collective bargaining itself the right assembles workers together no one has a right of assembly without a group of others who are in a structurally similar position in relation to the workforce in some human rights discourses the freedom of assembly is described as a fundamental form of freedom that deserves to be protected by government which means that governments are obligated to protect that freedom paradoxically perhaps governments must protect the freedom of assembly against governmental interference which is a way of saying that governments are under strict obligations to restrain themselves from attacking the rights of assembly by the illegitimate use of police and judicial powers to detain or arrest harass threaten censor imprison injure or kill as we can see there is a risk in this formulation from the start does freedom of assembly depend upon being protected by government or does it depend on a protection from government does it make sense for the people holding at bay who they are to rely on government to protect itself from government does the right exist only if a government confers this right on its people and to the degree that a government agrees to protect that right if so then the destruction of those rights of assembly by a government cannot be opposed by asserting the rights of assembly we can agree that freedom of assembly cannot be founded in natural law but is it still in some important way independent of any and every government does freedom of expression in fact exceed even defy those acts of government by which it is protected and defied these rights do not and cannot depend on governmental protection in those cases when the legitimacy of a government and the power of the state is being contested precisely by such an assembly or when a specific state has contravened violated the rights of assembly such that its population can no longer freely congregate without threat of state interference including military and police intervention moreover when the power of the state to protect rights becomes identified with the power of the state to withdraw that protection then freedom of assembly is exercised precisely to contest that form of arbitrary and illegitimate power some would say freedom of assembly in those cases contests the sovereignty of the state and that sovereignty implies this capacity to withdraw protection from of the rights of populations i think the agambenian idea of state sovereignty involves basically the state's exercise of the prerogative to suspend or withdraw rights that may be true and his formulation has been productive and useful to be sure but perhaps what is being opposed in such uh mobilizations is the idea the very idea that freedom of assembly itself can be lost as a right when the state opposes the aims of a particular assembly that happens as we know when the state itself becomes engaged in facilitating the expansion of markets and turning its own public obligations and services over to financial institutions transforming public entitlements into either consumer goods or investment opportunities the anti-privatization movement seeks to stop the saturation of the state by market forces such movements often happen in tandem with call with with with calls with calling into question the legitimacy of a government that has assumed authoritarian powers no one is any more arguing that free markets now foster democracy as milton friedman notoriously did in chile where the expansion of markets and authoritarianism worked beautifully together in both cases or in those cases in which both privatization and authoritarianism are being publicly opposed and i take that to be the case here the state uses its own military police and legal powers to suppress the freedom of assembly and other related freedoms precisely to censor those viewpoints and threaten and confine those who hold them so the freedom of assembly in my view has to be something other than a specific right allocated and protected by existing nation states that would mean that freedom of assembly requires that the state confers and protects that right and that the state remain in place and that without the state there is no right we under those conditions we could not assemble we could not rightly or legitimately assemble to call for the end of a government or even to contest the legitimacy of its power or particular uses of power over our freedom to assemble so in this way i want to conjecture that the freedom of assembly has to precede and exceed any form of government that confers and protects that right of assembly i say this not to affirm forms of permanent anarchy and certainly not to condone forms of mob rule rather i want to suggest that freedom of assembly may well be a precondition of politics itself one that presumes that bodies can move and gather in unregulated ways and that they can enact their political demands in a space that becomes public or redefines the public by virtue of those very enactments that assembly may be called the people or it may be one version of the people but they do not speak in one voice or even in one language they are beings with the capacity to move with whatever technical and infrastructural supports they require to do so and that means they can resolve to stand still not to move even to become immovable in their desires and their demands the power to move or to be still to speak and to act belongs to the assembly prior to and in excess of whatever rights a particular government decides to confer or to protect that very power of government may well become what freedom of assembly opposes and at that moment we see the operation of a form of popular sovereignty that is distinct from state sovereignty and whose task it is as popular sovereignty to distinguish itself from state sovereignty how then do we think about freedom of assembly as i'm trying to articulate it here and the idea of popular sovereignty i know that some people consider sovereignty a kind of bad word one that associates politics with a singular subject and a form of executive power with territorial claims but consider that sovereignty is but one way of describing acts of political self-determination especially for indigenous peoples which is why popular movements of indigenous struggle for sovereignty have become important ways to lay claim to space to move freely to express one's views to seek reparation and justice although elections are the way that government officials are supposed to represent popular sovereignty or the popular will more specifically the meaning of popular sovereignty has never been fully exhausted by the act of voting of course voting is essential for any concept of popular sovereignty but the exercise of sovereignty neither begins nor ends with the act of voting elections do not have never fully transferred sovereignty from the populace to its elected representatives something of popular sovereignty always remains untransferable marking the outside of the electoral process if not there would be no popular means of objecting to corrupt electoral processes in a sense the power of the populace remains separate from the power of those elected even after they have elected them for only as separate can the power of the populace continue to contest the conditions and results of elections as well as the actions of elected officials if the sovereignty of the people is fully transferred to and replaced by those whom the majority elect then what is lost are those powers we call critical those actions we call resistance and the lived possibility we call revolution so popular sovereignty certainly translates into electoral power when the people vote but that voting is never a full or adequate translation of popular sovereignty and to state sovereignty something of popular sovereignty remains untranslatable non-transferable and even unsubstitutable which is why it can both elect and dissolve regimes as much as popular sovereignty legitimates parliamentary forms of power it also retains the power to withdraw its support from those same forms when they prove to be illegitimate if parliamentary forms of power require popular sovereignty for their legitimacy they also surely fear it for there is something about popular sovereignty that runs counter to and exceeds or even outruns every parliamentary form that it institutes and grounds an elected regime can be brought to a halt or overcome by that assembly of people who speak in the name of the people enacting the very we who holds final legitimating power under conditions of democratic rule in other words the conditions of democratic rule depend finally on an exercise of popular sovereignty that is never fully contained or expressed by any particular democratic order but which is the condition of its democratic character this is i would suggest an extra parliamentary power without which no parliament can function legitimately and which threatens every parliament with dysfunction or even dissolution we may want to call it an anarchist interval or a permanent principle of revolution that resides within democratic orders one that shows up more or less at moments of founding and at moments of dissolution all this may seem clear enough but a difficult and persistent question remains who are the people have we yet posed that question and here i know that i come late to this debate derek la cloud balibar so many people spivak have all offered theoretical formulations for understanding what i am trying to ask here and they remain with me in tacit conversation as i think but so too through the pressing demands of contemporary mobilizations we cannot simply point to the people or take a snapshot that confirms who they are we cannot simply rely on aerial photographs taken by police charged with managing crowds on the street for that would really make the people into a matter of demographic forensics that photograph would doubtless have a frame that frame would both include and exclude what it captures the same would be true of a video that starts and ends somewhere and is always limited by the perspective by which its object is selectively crafted one thing we know is that not all the people assemble in the street or at least not on the same street zooming in zooming out will not help us here since those are precisely ways of editing and selecting what and who will count which means we cannot separate the question of who the people are from the technology that establishes and disestablishes which people will count as the people perhaps the people exceed every visual frame that seeks to capture the people sometimes the people or some people are confined or absent or outside the purview of the street and the camera the pre the prison is a case in point it never really happens that all of the possible people who are represented by the notion of the people show up in the same space and at the same time to claim that they are the people as if they were all free to move as if they all of their own volition arrive together in some space and time that can be described or photographed in some inclusive way indeed it would actually be odd if not terrifying to imagine every member of the group called the people coming together and speaking in unison it would have to be an image or fantasy usually we associate such forms of unanimous speaking in which everyone is saying the exact same thing at the same time with forms of fascism or compulsory forms of conformity in fact we the people the utterance the chant the written line is always missing some group of people it claims to represent some people fail to show up or are constrained from doing so some live on the margins of the metropole yet others seem to be saying something else or they're texting or blogging or functioning through new media some are emphatically or indifferently not speaking at all this means that the people never really arrive as a collective presence that speaks in verbal unity whoever the people may be they are surely internally divided appearing differentially or sequentially or never appearing at all or sometimes in degree probably also in some measure both gathered and dispersed and so ultimately not a unity so what follows a people do not need to be united on every issue or all gathered in a single space for conservative action to take place in the name of the people that name the people even the declaration we the people does not quite capture what the people do for there's always something other than the particular group that has formed and appeared and seems to be speaking um of what or what the people might want precisely because there's a gap between what happens in the name of the people and what the people want we have to rethink who the people are not all the people want the same thing or want it in the same way this failure does not need to be lamented the name of the people is appropriated contested and renewed always at risk of being expropriated or dismissed and the fragility and ferocity that marks the hegemonic struggle over the name the people is i think are i think signs of its democratic operation so even as some speaker or set of speakers invokes a we who fairly and fully represents all the people the plural we cannot really do what it nevertheless does such speakers may surely continue to strive for more inclusive aims underscoring the aspirational character of the we right so i say we i don't describe who the we is but i posit a we i hope will materialize but if the we is to work politically it has to be restricted to those who attempt to achieve and exercise hegemonic power over its invocation indeed those who assemble as the we presenting themselves as the people are not finally representing the people fully and adequately although they are performing several functions at once as voters or potential voters they provide the legitimating ground for those who do come to represent the people through elections but equally importantly the claim of elected officials to be representative requires the condensation of the people into a set of votes that can be tallied as a majority in this sense the people are always abbreviated if not nearly lost at the moment in which they elect those who represent them and political representation is in a sense what abbreviates and quantifies something we might call the will of the people at the same time something non-electoral is at work and i tried to explain that this anarchist interval is there i think in all democratic um political mobilization the people who speak the we whether within the electoral process outside it or against it constitute themselves as the people in the course of enacting or vocalizing that plural pronoun either literally or figuratively standing silent together in the face of the police can be precisely an enactment of that plural pronoun these acts of self-making or self-constitution are not quite the same as representing oneself or being represented we can see why when we track how the discursive term works the term the people does not only represent a pre-existing collection if it did the term would post-date the production of the collectivity itself the term can never adequately represent a collectivity when as it should be the collectivity is in the process of being made or of making itself this inadequacy is part of its meaning and part of its promise the discursive invocation of the we refers then to a people whose needs desires demands are not yet fully known and whose coming together is bound up with a future that is not yet lived out indeed practices of self-determination are not quite the same as acts of self-representation and yet both of these are at work in exercising the freedom of assembly in which we the people is spoken or enacted in some way this enactment is in my view performative in as much as it brings the people into being whom it names or it calls upon them to gather under the utterance and this means that it's part of a process of self-determination a designation of who we are that is also at the same time the making of that we the invocation of we separates popular sovereignty from state sovereignty in fact i want to say it names and inaugurates that very separation time and again the plurality always breaks with those who are elected or whose election becomes questionable to us or in relation to a state whose representatives we have never had the choice to elect as as is the clear case under occupation for the undocumented and the non-citizen so something that must fail as representation something we might call non-representative and nearly tautological becomes the basis of democratic forms of political self-determination popular sovereignty distinct from state sovereignty or rather popular sovereignty precisely as it time and again distinguishes itself from state sovereignty popular sovereignty makes sense only in this perpetual act of separating from state sovereignty thus it is a way of forming a people through acts of self-naming self-designation self-gathering these are repeated enactments verbal and non-verbal bodily and virtual undertaken across spatial and temporal zones and on different kinds of public stages virtual realities and shadow regions the vocalized performative we the people is surely one kind of enactment it's part of this enactment we are calling self-determination or self-constitution but this vocal figure cannot be taken as a literal account of how political self-determination works not every act of political self-determination can be translated into that verbal utterance such a move would make the verbal domain more privileged than any other in fact the enactment of political self-determination is necessarily a crossing of the linguistic and the bodily even if the action that constitutes self-enactment self-designation is remaining silent or being immovable even when the body is sequestered how do we for instance understand the hunger strike if not precisely as the practiced refusal of a body that cannot appear in public this means that appearing in public in a bodily form is not an adequate way of thinking about political self-determination if we want to include the hunger strike or prisoner resistance movements as part of self-determination prisoner networks are precisely those forms of solidarity that do not cannot appear in public in a bodily form they rely predominantly on digital media reports without images those networks of prisoners activists lawyers and extended kin and social relations whether here in turkey where you have a vast number of people imprisoned for political reasons in palestine or at pelican bay in california these are also those networks are also i want to argue forms of assembly composed of people who are exercising their freedom through strikes and petitions and forms of legal and political representation and acts of civil disobedience even as they do not appear they are exercising a certain right to appear in public either before the law or in public space or in the media objecting precisely to the interdiction against appearing publicly that is the condition of imprisonment given all this let us recapitulate what it might mean for rethinking freedom of assembly in relation to popular sovereignty first of all popular sovereignty is a form of reflexive self-making that is separate from the very representative regime it legitimates secondly it arises in the course of separating from state sovereignty popular sovereignty third cannot legitimate any particular regime without being separate from it that is without being controlled that is it must not be controlled by a regime or fully operationalized as its instrument and yet popular sovereignty is the basis upon which legitimate government is formed through fair and inclusive elections its act of self-making fourth i guess is actually a series of spatially distributed acts ones that do not always operate in the same way and for the same purposes among the most important of these spatial distinctions is that between the public sphere and spheres of forcible confinement including the prison where political prisoners those who have exercised freedom of assembly and freedom of speech are contained and subjugated this passage into and out of the public sphere is regulated precisely by legal and police power and the institution of the prison finally then fifth the enactment of we the people may or may not take linguistic form both speech and silence movement and immobility are all political enactments the hunger strike is precisely the inverse of the fed body standing freely in the public domain and speaking it marks and resists the deprivation of that right it enacts and exposes the deprivation that prison populations suffer so in a broad theoretical way i suppose i'm suggesting that there are enactments that are not fully reducible to assertions assertions i want to say even vocalizations are but one form of political enactment which is why the sphere of political performativity includes and exceeds verbal and written utterances since the public sphere is constituted in part through sites of forcible sequestering the borders that define the public are also those which define the confined the sequestered and the imprisoned whether we're speaking about the borders of the nation-state where refugees and the undocumented are confined within encampments where rights of citizenship are denied or indefinitely suspended or prisons where indefinite detention has become the norm the interdiction against appearing and moving and speaking in public becomes the precondition of embodied life and indeed embodied forms of resistance the prison is not exactly the inverse of the public sphere since prison advocacy networks traverse the walls of the prison but the prison is i want to suggest the limit case of the public sphere marking the power of the state to control who can pass into the public and who must pass out of it as long as the state controls the very conditions of freedom of assembly then popular sovereignty becomes an instrument of state sovereignty and the legitimating conditions of the state are lost at the same time that freedom of assembly is robbed of both its critical and democratic function maybe all this is already known maybe there's nothing new here but sometimes as an academic you're always under pressure to say something new but in the political sphere sometimes you have to say the exact same thing a thousand times before it is heard so i don't care if it's radically new but i do care if that someone hears me at some point do i make a fetish out of the notion of the people well the invocation of the people becomes and must become contestable at the very moment that it appears we started here today with the claim that the actions by which people assemble and assert themselves to be a people may be spoken or enacted in ways that include inaction and stillness the second is that we have to be able to think of such acts as plural action presupposing a plurality of bodies who enact their convergent purpose in ways that do not require strict conformity to a single kind of acting or to a single kind of claim and who do not together constitute a single kind of subject i have now begun i think to add a third claim which is that the prison is the limit case of the public sphere as is by the way the refugee camp and that freedom of assembly is haunted by the possibility of imprisonment one may be imprisoned for what one says or one may be imprisoned by assembling for assembling or one may be imprisoned for writing or teaching about assemblies or about freedom struggles or by teaching about popular struggles for sovereignty such as the kurdish movement all of these are reasons why those with the freedom to appear can never fully or adequately represent the people since there are people who we know are missing from the public missing from this public and they are those who must find representation even as those who seek to represent them risk sometimes imprisonment for doing so and it's not just that there are some people who happen to be missing here today who could not have gathered in geze or who can no longer gather there that very power of confinement is a way of defining producing and controlling what will count as the public sphere it works alongside privatization as a process that seeks to make public space into the entrepreneurial field of the market-driven state so though we may wonder why it is that crowds that gather to oppose privatization are broken up and dispersed by police force gassing and physical assault we have to remember that the state which is off loading public space to private enterprise or that now make such decisions according to market values is involved in at least two ways of controlling and decimating public space some lament that a movement that begins with opposing privatization inevitably becomes a movement that opposes police violence i certainly heard this time and again in the united states in relation to the occupy movement we started with this great critique and it always becomes about the police but what i want to suggest here is that the seizure of public space from popular sovereignty from freedom of assembly in particular is precisely the aim of both privatization and police assaults on freedom of assembly in this way as well the market and the prison work together in a prison industry which as angela davis has clearly shown works to regulate rights of citizenship in the u.s this happens in irrefutably racist ways as black men constitute the vast majority of prisoners we can add that the market and the prison also work together to constrict and decimate and appropriate public space where we might expect to find what hana arent has called the right to appear if the plural subject is constituted in the course of its performative enactments then that means it's not already constituted it means as well that whatever form it has prior to its performative exercise is not quite the same as the form it takes on as it acts and after it has acted the we affects a certain gathering at the same time it's only when bodies gather in some particular configuration of space and time that any we comes into being even if it is not explicitly spoken so how do we then understand this movement of gathering which is durational and implies occasional periodic or definitive forms of scattering it's not one act but rather a convergence of enactments different from one another a form of political sociality irreducible to conformity even when a crowd speaks together they have to gather in close enough proximity to hear someone else's voice to pace one's own vocalization achieve rhythm harmony to sufficient degree and so to achieve a relation both auditory and corporeal with those with whom some signifying action or speech act is undertaken we start to speak now and we stop now we start to move now or more or less at a given time but certainly not as a single organism we try to stop all at once but some keep moving and others move and rest at their own pace temporal seriality and coordination bodily proximity auditory range coordinated vocalization all of these constitute essential dimensions of assembly and demonstration and they are all presupposed by the speech act that enunciates we the people they're the complex elements of the occasion of its enunciation is there then any speech act that brings forth we the people that's not a bodily and political movement of some kind does that speech act always presuppose gather and enact a body politic on the one hand if we take vocalization as the model of the speech act then the body is surely presupposed as the organ of speech both the organic condition and vehicle of speech the body is not transmuted into pure thought when it speaks but signifies continues to signify the organic conditions for verbalization so if speech is conceptualized restrictively as vocalized speech act there is no speech without the organ of speech which means that there's surely no speech act without the organic or at least without the technical but what does the organic dimension of speech do to the claims made in speech or on behalf of speech i want to suggest that if one assumes that speech reflects consciousness and the intention of the speaker or the will of an assembly then intentional will are figured as cognitive moments re represented by speech speech is then understood as corresponding to these prior cognitive dispositions shoshana feldman has made this clear in her luskandal palong i don't know what it's called in english right now that precisely because speech is impossible without the organic even the speech act that seeks to convey a purely cognitive intention cannot circumvent the organic body the most purely ideal intention manifest in speech is impossible without its bodily enactment so just as there is no purely linguistic speech act separated from bodily acts there's no purely conceptual moment of thought that can do away with its own embodied condition and this tells us something about what it means to say we the people since whether it's written in a text or uttered on the street it designates an assembly in the act of designating and forming itself it acts on itself as it acts and a corporeal condition of plurality is indexed whether or not it appears on the occasion of the utterance that bodily condition plural and dynamic is a constitutive dimension of the occasion right i have much more to say about all that but you know i'm going to move ahead um so one of the things i want to say on the basis of this particular reflection is that the embodied character of the people proves quite important to the kinds of demands that are made when for instance wealth is accumulated among two percent of the population and increasing numbers of people lose their homes and employment then the people are clearly divided along class lines and economic power is distributed in radically unequal ways when those who face accelerating prospects of precarity take to the streets and begin their claim with we the people or by simply gathering then they are asserting that they those who appear and speak are identified as the people they are working to combat oblivion the phrase does not imply that those who profit are not the people and it doesn't even necessarily imply a simple sense of inclusion we are the people too rather it asserts a form of equality in the face of increasing inequality and it does this not simply by uttering the phrase but by embodying equality to whatever extent that proves possible constituting an assembly of the people on the grounds of equality one might say they are asserting inequality in the midst of i'm sorry they are asserting equality in the midst of inequality and that this is vain and useless since their act is only symbolic and it's a small group and true economic equality continues to be more elusive for those whose debts are astronomical and unpayable and employment prospects foreclosed and yet i still want to argue and i'm happy to be accused of being naive that the embodiment of equality in the practices of assembly the insistence on interdependency the commonly held ground all start to put into the world a version of equality that is rapidly vanishing in other quarters the point is not to regard the body merely as an instrument for making a political claim that has cognitive and or linguistic features but to let this body this plurality of bodies become the precondition of all further political claims indeed in the politics of the street that has been with us in the last years in the occupied movement tahrir square porta del sol gaise park the basic requirements of the body are at the center of political mobilizations those requirements are in fact publicly enacted prior to any set of political demands over and against forces of privatization the destruction of public services and space and the ideals of public good precipitated by the takeover of neoliberal forms of rationality in governance and everyday life bodies gather who require food shelter protection from injury and violence the freedom to move to work to have access to health care bodies require other bodies for support and for survival it matters what age those bodies are whether they are able-bodied since in all forms of dependency bodies require not just one and one other person but social systems of support that are complexly human and technical such systems are of support are precisely what are being decimated by privatization neoliberalism and austerity measures and but also by systemically induced global inequalities it is precisely in a world in which the bodily life of increasing numbers of people is proving to be highly precarious that bodies emerge together on the pavement or the dirt or along the wall that separates them from their land they form assemblies which can include virtual participants and they and even then they assume a set of interlocking locations for a plural set of bodies in this way the bodies belong to the pavement the ground the architecture and the technology by which they live and move and work and desire we cannot really speak about bodies without their environments the machines the complex systems of social interdependency which are their conditions of support no body survives much less flourishes without such conditions of support although there are those who say that active bodies assembled on the street constitute a powerful and surging multitude one that in itself constitutes a radical democratic event or action i find that i can only partially agree with that view when the people break off from established power they do enact the popular will or seek to though to know that for certain we would have to know who is breaking off and where and when and who does not break off and where are they there are after all all sorts of surging multitudes i would not want to endorse even if i do not dispute their right to assemble they would include lynch mobs anti-semitic or racist or fascist congregations and violent forms of anti-parliamentary mass movements i'm less concerned with the ostensible vitality of surging multitudes or any nascent and promising life force that seems to belong to their collective action than joining in a struggle to establish more sustaining conditions of livability in the face of systematically induced precarity and forms of racial destitution the final aim of politics is in my view not simply to surge forth together although i suppose that would be one way to go out though this can be an essential moment of effective intensity within a broader struggle against precarity i do not doubt it it can constitute a new lived sense of the people even if sometimes for the purposes of radical democratic change which i do endorse it is important to surge forth in ways that claim and alter the attention of the world for some more enduring possibility of livable life for all it is one thing to few alive or to affirm aliveness and yet another to say that that fleeting sense is all that we can expect from politics feeling alive is not quite the same as struggling for a world in which life becomes livable for those who have not yet been valued as living beings okay or polenic although i understand that something has to hold such a group together some demand some felt sense of injustice and unlivability some shared intimation of the possibility of change and that change has to be fueled by a resistance to minimally existing and expanding economic inequalities ever accelerating conditions of precarity for many populations both locally and globally forms of authoritarian and securitarian control that seek to suppress democratic processes and mass movements and state and institutional racism on the one hand there are bodies that assemble on the street or online or through other less visible networks of solidarity especially prison networks whose political claims are made through forms of solidarity that may or may not directly appear in public space on the other hand there are mobilizations that emerge in public that make their claims through action action gesture language movement through linking arms through refusing to move to forming bodily modes of obstruction to police and state authorities a given movement can move in and out of the space of heightened public exposure depending on its strategies and the military and police threats it must face militant and plural exposure is the site where need and resistance converge to return to the beginning then how are we to understand what makes assemblies possible and what makes them effective it is not i would suggest exclusively or primarily as subjects bearing abstract rights that we take to the streets if we bear those rights to freedom of assembly to constitute ourselves as a people then we enact them in our bodily practices they may well be stated but the statement is already in the assembly signified by plural bodies coming together before anyone has to speak or by bodies undergoing resistance in different cells and across continents at the same time the transcontinental hunger strike we take to the streets if we have the power to do so because we need to walk or move there we need streets to be structured so that whether or not we require technical assistance we can move there pass through that space without obstruction harassment administrative detention fear of injury or death if we are on the streets it's because the streets define us politically as beings who must lay claim to public freedom but it is also because we are bodies who require government commitment to public space infrastructural support social service for our continuing existence mobility is itself a right of the body to be sure it is also a precondition for the exercise of other rights including the right of assembly assembly is at once the condition of any possible claim at the same time that it is a specific right to which an assembly lays claim which is why an assembly articulates some fundamental dimension of democratic life prior to apart from making any verbal claim finally let us remember that every claim we make to the public sphere is haunted by the prison and anticipates the prison in other words here in geze and on others in other parks or other streets you have been detained and arrested or you are close to people who have been detained and arrested that is now the risk of appearing in public and those medical professionals who came to help you have been arrested for trying to help you and those lawyers who sought to defend your rights of assembly and expression have been detained and arrested for doing so and those human rights workers who sought to bring these crimes to the broader international public have also been detained or threatened with arrest and those people in the media who sought to make known what has happened here have also been censored detained and arrested this means that wherever the people seek to make the public space their own an emblem of popular sovereignty they risk you risk being stopped injured or prisoned by the police who represent state power this means that when we think about public assembly we are always thinking about the police power that lets it happen that stops it from happening the moment which the state starts to attack the people it is supposed to represent and whose rights it is entrusted to protect this means that forms of solidarity with political prisoners indeed with all people incarcerated under unjust conditions means that solidarity has to happen across the public sphere and the sphere of confinement prisoners are precisely those who are denied freedom of assembly and access to public space so the very government movement to privatize state parks and to allow privatization to take the place of public goods and public rights is at once a movement to establish police control over public space there is no more effective way to do this than by imprisoning those who claim the right to public space and they do this through expelling protesters who seek to claim the public sphere for the public for the people that is one way to understand the arrest and detention of those who have fought the state as it wages its war on public life for us i think this means that forms of solidarity can never be restricted to public assembly alone since prisoner networks are forms of solidarity that are built in confinement and it is their ability to move freely in public and to express and enact their political claims to the public for which we also have to struggle so it seems we have to understand every public space is haunted by the police station and the police and the prison and that to walk and move and speak there in concert is precisely to come up against the possibility of being forbidden access to that common world if privatization seeks to destroy public space so prison is the ultimate way of borrowing access to public space in this sense privatization and prison work together to keep you out of the places where you know that you belong to each other no one can have the right to public assembly alone as any of us claim that right as we must we have to do it with one another in the midst of all our differences and disagreements and in solidarity with those who have already lost that right who or who have never been recognized as belonging to that public this is especially true for those who appear on the street without permits who are opposing the police or the military or other security forces without weapons who are transgendered in transphobic environments who are without documents in countries who see that seek to criminalize those who who who ask for rights of citizenship although one may be shorn of protection one is not reduced to some sort of bare life let's not let's not insult the subjugated with that particular term on the contrary to be shorn of protection is a form of political exposure at once concretely vulnerable even breakable and potentially and actively defiant even revolutionary the bodies that assemble together designate and form themselves as we the people targeting those forms of abstraction that would act as if those social and bodily requirements for life can be destroyed for the sake of neo liberal metrics and market rationalities to show up in an assembly opposed to such destitution is to be exposed is to be defiant meaning precisely that we are crafted precisely in that disjuncture in crafting ourselves we are we expose we do the bodies in the name of which we make our demand we do this for and with one another without any necessary presumption of harmony or of love we do not have to know each other to make this demand for one another no body is possible without those other bodies linked we might say by the arm or linked we might say in the name of another concept of democracy that demands new forms of solidarity on and off the street thank you very much i want to thank judith for this um wonderfully inspiring and thought-provoking um lecture thank you i have so many points to make that i'd better not make them now did it no no no you have to make a few just to tell you it resonated so well and i guess the audience will already um say this to you it did resonate so well with the experience of the guessing park here which is of course part of this global and popular um sort of wave of popular uprisings that we call occupy movements but it really did touch a chord here and just for the sake of um giving the audience also some time to engage with you um i would like to just open the question okay would you mind i don't okay thank you so maybe we could proceed like this and since we have about 30 minutes or 40 maximum i guess um for the questions could we like take three questions at a time let's do that answer then proceed and see where we go and if we can keep the questions sort of short we can allow everybody to to speak i'm sure we can't allow everyone i mean no like you know you said yeah this is this is the popular assembly like here we're representative of something maybe we could begin with that so is there anybody who would like to start with a question just somebody over there here here okay we start here yeah there's a microphone that's coming maybe if you could say your name also that would be lovely um see how dependent we are on technology um and maybe i feel like there's something to this a little bit in that type of exercise get back to you i guess i'm taking other questions um this one is there this one um already you if um see any changes in terms of the way those people come together and the way those people you know start speaking together um um um okay can i just do that great um yeah i'm not sure oh perhaps that works okay great um well thank you those are all um uh good questions um and and um the first question i i feel maybe it comes out of some kind of guilt and i ask don't be guilty but but but seriously let's think about it this way that that any any any popular assembly to be effective has to be established by one media or another in other words media is a precondition of the knowability legibility of a particular movement assembly demonstration so there's always that dependency on media and it's constitutive um so to be part of the mediated elaboration of the event is actually already important to it and whether you're reporting it or commenting on it you're giving it more discursive and media life which is i think an important thing to do both to figure out what is happening what it means and where um where people might might might go from there at the same time of course there is a radical difference between um um um being in twitter solidarity uh which which i'm not demeaning at all being in twitter solidarity and being on the street or being exposed to violence detention um any number of possible uh quite important physical and political consequences so there's a differential of risk and exposure that um separates those who are on site from those who are reporting commenting elaborating but there's a there's an an indissoluble link between them even though it's not it's not an identity it's they're not identical situations so so that's my way of of trying to address that about non-harmony um i think um in general um that dependency is hell and that interdependency is hell i'm sorry i think my jokes aren't coming across uh i i think be living in a world with others in which we we actually recognize fundamental interdependency is not always an experience of love happiness or harmony we rail against dependency we can't bear it but we also can't deny it and i think those complex set of emotions they certainly come to the fore in in social institutions where um interdependency is is very heightened but also um when you belong to a political movement together and people speak it or articulate it or start making sense of it in ways that that are conflicted now um i think it's inevitable for a movement that for some people it may be the authoritarian structure of the regime that is most appalling for others it may be privatization for others it might be making gay lesbian transgender lives visible in public space um as as part of these struggles they may or there may be very different ways of articulating what is being done for what purpose and why i don't necessarily think people have to have one purpose i think there are interlinking purposes and there are certain kinds of practices and discussions that can keep those conflicts alive in ways that are actually mobilizing and important um and not necessarily paralyzing but but i i do think that harmony is a um an impossible ideal and that it tends to produce more fragmentation than it solves uh it's nothing worse than being um in a large group where everybody's in harmony with one another and you're definitely not in harmony with them or you're part of another group that's definitely not in harmony with them and then the question is whether whether a robust democratic movement can can maintain and work with that disharmony as as part of its democratic character so i suppose i um i i follow uh le cloud move to some degree and their important way of figuring antagonism at the center of of democratic um forms of solidarity which isn't to say that i affirm conflict for conflict's sake or that i love being in fights with people i do not but that i accept that that there are many different kinds of sources of disagreement and that a robust movement is able to move with disagreement rather than enforce impossible or premature resolution certainly i mean there are many different ways that people come together and fall apart and i don't mean to be suggesting that there is one way or that that way is changeless um i'm not exactly sure what the heart heart negri reference is too um but i i do think that michael hart's recent work on love suggests that he and i would have very different views on um what's what political sociality looks like and what democratic um gatherings look like and what they're about i do worry that that position sometimes does subscribe to a kind of vitalism in its romanticization of the dionysian for instance and um some of my more critical views on the surging multitude contrasting the idea of aliveness with struggling for conditions of livability is perhaps a small polemic against them although you know i'm on the same side um as those people for the most part um um the question you're asking whether the question of who the people are whether that's really important to contemporary movements that's a really really crucial question and i suppose one answer to that is that i don't think that the question who are the people who who constitutes the people i don't think it has to be asked explicitly in that way but when a group of people do come together to claim or reclaim public space or to protect it against its destruction or decimation they are doing it and in in some ways that that indexes the idea of the people or the populous or the public that that is part of what is happening that's part of the entitlement that's part of the exercise it's part of the claim whether it's spoken in that language or enacted in another one so in my view i think i think um the question of the people in the question of popular sovereignty or self-determination is is is bound up with the the question of to whom does public space belong to whom does public space belong it belongs to the people if it is public space otherwise it's no longer public space so i want to say it's presupposed by the struggle itself i think there's some some other okay two embarrassing thank i very much for coming my question is actually um what would you say for activists and uh students of theory when if this is true in every country but to different percentages how do activists operate in a country where a percentage of the population is actually supporting the government's efforts to curb their civil rights so you mentioned that many people doesn't actually speak from all people so if there's a percentage of the society that actually supports on the state's efforts to curtail their rights how can activists overcome this um either on a theoretical perspective um well it's a great question but i can't i can't give you practical advice i mean i'm just not very good at that um uh should we take another one yeah well let me just let me just briefly address this one if that's okay what i want to just say is that when it becomes in the interest of a large number of people to understand themselves as consumers entrepreneurs uh members of that uh aspiring members of an economic system where where profit or security is being held out as a as a possible benefit there has to be a kind of pretty strong criticism and opposition to that entire scheme of values in other words other kinds of values have to be brought into into into the four and that's that's a solicitation you know that's about persuasion it's about struggle it's about solicitation so the question again is not who are the people and we may be very unhappy to learn who the people are right but how does the hegemonic contest over who the people can be how is that to be waged right and that's that strikes me as the political work of anybody who's seeking to safeguard some some sense of democracy and the public good over and against say privatization and um increasing creeping authoritarianism um that that that has to be part of a a very large mobilization but i think we have to think about the people as a term over which there is a hedge there's a hegemonic struggle okay hi um my question is kind of general but i'm wondering if you can speak more about what you ended your thoughts on which was sort of the demand for new forms or new ways of solidarity i'm really interested in that because i think in many ways what we're seeing you know here in istanbul i i'm telling you that i'm not sure what it looks like well i i think the only thing that i want to say right now um well i guess there are two points one is um sometimes an assembly is ephemeral and transitory because um because it articulates what it has to articulate and its own divisions or its own material conditions of perpetuating our are are not sufficient to sustain it other times an assembly can be transit very transitory precisely because it's destroyed by police force and and compulsory expulsion from the site of its occupation which we've seen here and we've seen clearly in the occupy movement in the us um in other places as well so then the real question is how does the relationship to police power have to be cultivated in order to um expand the life of a solidarity movement or a democratic movement such that uh uh it's not condemned to be merely uh ephemeral for um because because of of police violence and i think that kind of practice of resisting police or operating with police is extremely important um and um and and that involves an elaborate network it also involves um a network of of people who are not necessarily activists in an immediate sense like like lawyers and media people who are willing to take whatever risks there are for them i also think that the conditions of increasing precarity or precariotization um mean that certain kinds of um features of of political life have to be foregrounded and are being foregrounded so that we gather not just to say i want to be able to speak my mind don't worry i'm well fed i have a job everything else is perfectly secure in my world i just want to be able to speak freely it's not a pure anti-censorship campaign i want to be able to speak i want to be able to move because i am this body and this body has to be fed and supported and requires health care and requires shelter and has rights to work and all of those what we would call kind of concrete rights or embodied rights i think are coming to the fore under conditions of precariotization and the way that movements work um to set up temporary shelters or to foreground issues of embodied interdependencies seem to characterize that as if something about economic interdependency and economic rights is being asserted in the very form of the of the um the assembly itself um and that's why i think it's not it's not just the abstract rights of individuals that is that is at issue but the the capacity to survive precarity and to flourish in a world um under under conditions that are not vanquished by securitarian control or or neo-liberal forms of decimation and i think in relationship to those particular issues right now there are different different kinds of assemblies and different kinds of of actions that are required should we take maybe uh one or two more questions and then and then in turn i think we can gather both of them yeah okay so there's someone over there down the street um um um so i have a i i don't know why there is not one but i completely agree with you that there should be one and i'm sorry next time i i want to say very short um okay i just want to add that we were not sure i'm sure this is what she said i'm just going to add it in my own right we were not sure i was going to be able to give this talk until about five or six days ago or 10 days ago so this head was put together very quickly but if we had more time to plan i agree agree we have translation next time see she understands turkish okay maybe two more questions i don't know but two i think this is going to get into something more specific the two groups that were very prominent here in disney resistance were the lgbt groups and the anti-capitalist muslims um i'm just wondering what your thoughts are regarding why it would be those rooms that would become prominent in the resistance one thing that i can think of myself is in relation to how these bodies are produced differently both um differently from the hegemony but also differently from each other in this question i'm not really proposing these two books at it interests me quite a bit but you as you know it would be a really um um rather stupid thing for an american academic to come and tell you why these two groups you know i mean i uh i mean i could tell you who to invite they will tell you i can give you a list of people who would answer that question oh my you're i'm here to learn about this right now so you know ask um and what has happened during the last is that also other terms have been employed in this particular case it was interesting that there were times what happens if your claim that they represent not the people but the citizens or the nation as opposed to the people so we still have uh hmm you know i think that that there is this question of when and what you know i don't know i don't want to fetishize the idea of the people you know it's overused it's cliche he does it doesn't have to be that word that does what i'm trying to describe okay so i'm not saying it must be that word okay or i stand for that word or you should stand for that word i don't know it's discursive moment and it's contested so it can work in many different ways but what i am hearing in your question is um is is precisely this issue of when and where let's say a people a populist gets instrumentalized or owned by the state so that state sovereignty uh uses uh popular sovereignty as its instrument or it understands its own um power to contain and own popular sovereignty to represent it right and citizen can work sometimes precisely to assimilate the people into the state you are a member of the state you participate in this state and it also divides citizen and non-citizen right at which point the people are divided along those so there is there can be an act of kind of appropriation instrumentalization and ownership in in that language at which point from you know my question is i don't know if there are words that can hold that can separate popular sovereignty from state sovereignty maybe the people maybe not the people maybe no words maybe gathering without words maybe a visual sequence may be another kind of enactment altogether i can't predict that but i think your question attests to the necessity of that particular separation and the risk the risk that is involved precisely there um okay i think we're oh okay one mask but then this is truly very truly the last excuse okay but i'm wondering how to actually translate the power of the subway into real change and more necessarily a change that actually represents the will of people who actually started this yes i'll be in the first place because i couldn't lead to a change at the time but it is a discussion if it was actually represented about what the people wanted so when you use the term power in that particular question um it seems to me that you're um you're talking about the power to affect change right so effective power um and um the conditions of affecting change are shifting and strategic and difficult so for instance right now we might think there's a is there a lull in this movement is this movement now taking new forms what are its what are its goals uh how is it reformulating those goals all those things have to be tracked in ways that are very specific and very contextual and because i'm i'm not well some of my colleagues are good leninists i'm not a very good leninist i can't say this is how it works this is what you must you know i don't do that um but um but i am interested in when it does work or when it works provisionally or when it starts to work and becomes actually a mass movement or does um affect uh more radical change and um and i think we at this point in time we have to be aware of the different ways that mobilizations work the different forms that political struggles take i don't think there's one form and perhaps the question we have to ask or what are the conditions of renewability under under conditions where police power is accelerating and where state power is augmenting itself and those are very specific kinds of strategic questions the power of the people or popular the power of assembly is not some ontological resource we have that just surges up and creates change it uh it is exercised through deliberation enactment um forms of solidarity forms of division new new ways of strategizing uh different kinds of alliances that are made or broken these are you know these your questions are questions that belong to the the study and practice of social movements more broadly and i i don't think they can be answered in uh at a purely theoretical level okay so thank you very much hmm

Channel: Columbia Global Centers

Views: 8,048

Keywords: judith butler, Rethinking Vulnerability and Res, Feminism and Social Change, feminism, social change, global centers, istanbul

Id: Yd-7iT2JtXk

Length: 99min 59sec (5999 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 11 2013