Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly

Judith Butler

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780674495562
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

A Times Higher Education Book of the WeekJudith Butler elucidates the dynamics of public assembly under prevailing economic and political conditions, analyzing what they signify and how. Understanding assemblies as plural forms of performative action, Butler extends her theory of performativity to argue that precarity—the destruction of the conditions of livability—has been a galvanizing force and theme in today's highly visible protests."Butler's book is everything that a book about our planet in the 21st century should be. It does not turn its back on the circumstances of the material world or give any succour to those who wish to view the present (and the future) through the lens of fantasies about the transformative possibilities offered by conventional politics Butler demonstrates a clear engagement with an aspect of the world that is becoming in many political contexts almost illicit to discuss: the idea that capitalism, certainly in its neoliberal form, is failing to provide a liveable life for the majority of human beings."
—Mary Evans, Times Higher Education "A heady immersion into the thought of one of today's most profound philosophers of action…This is a call for a truly transformative politics, and its relevance to the fraught struggles taking place in today's streets and public spaces around the world cannot be denied."
—Hans Rollman, PopMatters

Chapter 1

Gender Politics and the Right to Appear

Originally, I had given the “title” Bodies in Alliance for the original set of lectures at Bryn Mawr College in 2011 that provided the rudiments for this text. It was a timely title, it turns out, although the moment that I came up with it was one in which I could not have known how the title’s meaning would play out in time, assume another shape and force. So there we were, gathered in that academic setting as people were gathering across the United States and several other nations to contest various issues, including despotic rule and economic injustice, sometimes challenging capitalism itself, or some of its contemporary forms. And other times, and possibly at the same time, amassing in public together in order to be seen and heard as a plural political presence and force.

We might see these mass demonstrations as a collective rejection of socially and economically induced precarity. More than that, however, what we are seeing when bodies assemble on the street, in the square, or in other public venues is the exercise—one might call it performative—of the right to appear, a bodily demand for a more livable set of lives.

However problematically the notion of “responsibility” has been reappropriated for neoliberal purposes, the concept remains a crucial feature of the critique of accelerating inequality. In the neoliberal morality, each of us is only responsible for ourselves, and not for others, and that responsibility is first and foremost a responsibility to become economically self-sufficient under conditions when self-sufficiency is structurally undermined. Those who cannot afford to pay for health care constitute but one version of a population deemed disposable. And all those who see the increasing gap between rich and poor, who understand themselves to have lost several forms of security and promise, they also understand themselves as abandoned by a government and a political economy that clearly augments wealth for the very few at the expense of the general population. So when people amass on the street, one implication seems clear: they are still here and still there; they persist; they assemble, and so manifest the understanding that their situation is shared, or the beginning of such an understanding. And even when they are not speaking or do not present a set of negotiable demands, the call for justice is being enacted: the bodies assembled “say” “we are not disposable,” whether or not they are using words at the moment; what they say, as it were, is “we are still here, persisting, demanding greater justice, a release from precarity, a possibility of a livable life.”

To demand justice is, of course, a strong thing to do—it also immediately involves every activist in a philosophical problem: What is justice, and what are the means through which the demand for justice can be made, understood, taken up? The reason it is sometimes said that there are “no demands” when bodies assemble in this way and for this purpose is that the list of demands would not exhaust the meaning of justice that is being demanded. In other words, we can all imagine just solutions to health care, public education, housing, and the distribution and availability of food—that is, we could itemize the injustices in the plural, and present them as a set of specific demands. But perhaps the demand for justice is present in each of those demands, but also necessarily exceeds them. This is clearly a Platonic point, but we do not have to subscribe to a theory of Forms to see other ways in which it operates. For when bodies gather as they do to express their indignation and to enact their plural existence in public space, they are also making broader demands: they are demanding to be recognized, to be valued, they are exercising a right to appear, to exercise freedom, and they are demanding a livable life. Of course, there have to be conditions under which such a claim is registered as a claim. And with the public demonstrations in Ferguson, Missouri, in the summer of 2014, it is easy to see how quickly forms of public political opposition—in this case opposition to the police killing of an unarmed black man, Michael Brown—are quickly renamed as “unrest” or “riots.”¹ The concerted actions of groups for the purpose of opposing state violence are understood in these instances as violent action, even when they do not engage in violent acts. How do we understand the form of signification that such protests seek to convey in relation to how they are named by those they oppose? Is this a political form of enacted and plural performativity, the workings of which requires its own consideration?

A QUESTION OFTEN POSED TO ME is the following: How does one move from a theory of gender performativity to a consideration of precarious lives? Although sometimes the question is looking for a biographical answer, it is still a theoretical concern—what is the connection between these two concepts, if there is one? It seems that I was concerned with queer theory and the rights of sexual and gender minorities, and now I am writing more generally about the ways in which war or other social conditions designate certain populations as ungrievable. In Gender Trouble (1989) it sometimes seemed that certain acts that individuals could perform would or could have a subversive effect on gender norms. Now I am working the question of alliances among various minorities or populations deemed disposable; more specifically, I am concerned with how precarity—that middle term and, in some ways, that mediating term—might operate, or is operating, as a site of alliance among groups of people who do not otherwise find much in common and between whom there is sometimes even suspicion and antagonism. One political point probably has remained pretty much the same even as my own focus has shifted, and that is that identity politics fails to furnish a broader conception of what it means, politically, to live together, across differences, sometimes in modes of unchosen proximity, especially when living together, however difficult it may be, remains an ethical and political imperative. Moreover, freedom is more often than not exercised with others, not necessarily in a unified or conformist way. It does not exactly presume or produce a collective identity, but a set of enabling and dynamic relations that include support, dispute, breakage, joy, and solidarity.

To understand this dynamic, I propose to investigate two realms of theory abbreviated by the terms “performativity” and “precarity” in order then to suggest how we might consider the right to appear as a coalitional framework, one that links gender and sexual minorities with precarious populations more generally. Performativity characterizes first and foremost that characteristic of linguistic utterances that in the moment of making the utterance makes something happen or brings some phenomenon into being. J. L. Austin is responsible for the term, but it has gone through many revisions and alterations, especially in the work of Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, to name but a few.² An utterance brings what it states into being (illocutionary) or makes a set of events happen as a consequence of the utterance being made (perlocutionary). Why would people be interested in this relatively obscure theory of speech acts? In the first instance, it seems, performativity is a way of naming a power language has to bring about a new situation or to set into motion a set of effects. It is no accident that God is generally credited with the first performative: “Let there be light,” and then suddenly light there is. Or presidents who declare war usually do see wars materialize as a result of their declaration, just as judges who pronounce two people married usually also, under the right legal conditions, produce married couples as a result of their utterances. The point is not only that language acts, but that it acts powerfully. So how, then, does a performative theory of speech acts become a performative theory of gender? In the first place, there are usually medical professionals who declare a wailing infant to be a boy or a girl, and even if their utterance is not audible above the din, the box they check is surely legible on the legal documents that get registered with the state. My wager is that most of us have had our genders established by virtue of someone checking a box and sending it in, although in some cases, especially for those with intersexed conditions, it might have taken a while to check the box, or the check may have been erased a few times, or the letter may have been delayed before it was sent. In any case, there was doubtless a graphic event that inaugurated gender for the vast majority of us, or perhaps someone simply exclaimed into the air, “it’s a boy” or “it’s a girl” (although sometimes that first exclamation is surely a question: someone, dreaming only of having a boy, can only ask one question, “is it a boy?”). Or if we are adopted, someone who decides to consider adopting us has to check off the gender preference, or has to agree to the gender that we are before they can proceed. In some ways, these all remain discursive moments at the inception of our gendered lives. And rarely was there really one person who decided our fate—the idea of a sovereign power with extraordinary linguistic powers has been for the most part replaced by a more diffuse and complicated set of discursive and institutional powers.

So, then, if performativity was considered linguistic, how do bodily acts become performative? This is a question we have to ask to understand the formation of gender, but also the performativity of mass demonstrations. In the case of gender, those primary inscriptions and interpellations come with the expectations and fantasies of others that affect us in ways that are at first uncontrollable: this is the psychosocial imposition and slow inculcation of norms. They arrive when we can scarcely expect them, and they make their way with us, animating and structuring our own forms of responsiveness. Such norms are not simply imprinted on us, marking and branding us like so many passive recipients of a culture machine. They also “produce” us, but not in the sense of bringing us into being, nor in the sense of strictly determining who we are. Rather, they inform the lived modes of embodiment we acquire over time, and those very modes of embodiment can prove to be ways of contesting those norms, even breaking with them.

One example of how that happens most clearly is when we reject the terms of gender assignment; indeed, we may well embody or enact that rejection prior to putting our views into words. Indeed, we may know that rejection first as a visceral refusal to conform to the norms relayed by gender assignment. Although we are in some ways obligated to reproduce the norms of gender, the police who oversee our compliance with that obligation are sometimes falling asleep on the job. And we find ourselves veering from the designated path, doing that partially in the dark, wondering whether we did on some occasion act like a girl, or act like enough of a girl, or act enough like a boy, or whether boyness is well exemplified by the boy we are supposed to be, or whether we have somehow missed the mark, and find ourselves dwelling either happily or not so happily between the established categories of gender. The possibility of missing the mark is always there in the enactment of gender; in fact, gender may be that enactment in which missing the mark is a defining feature. There is an ideality, if not a phantasmic dimension to cultural norms of gender, and even as emerging humans seek to reiterate and accommodate those norms, they surely also become aware of a persistent gap between those ideals—many of which conflict with one another—and our various lived efforts at embodiment, where our own understanding and the understanding of others are at cross purposes. If gender first comes to us as someone else’s norm, it resides within us as a fantasy that is at once formed by others and also part of my formation.

But my point here, at least, is somewhat simple: gender is received, but surely not simply inscribed on our bodies as if we were merely a passive slate obligated to bear a mark. But what we are at first obligated to do is enact the gender that we are assigned, and that involves, at an unknowing level, being formed by a set of foreign fantasies that are relayed through interpellations of various kinds. And though gender is enacted, time and again, the enactment is not always in compliance with certain kinds of norms, surely not always in precise conformity with the norm. There may be a problem deciphering the norm (there may be several conflicting demands relaying which version of gender is to be achieved, and through what means), but there may be something about enacting a norm that holds within it the possibility of noncompliance. Although gender norms precede us and act upon us (that is one sense of their enactment), we are obligated to reproduce them, and when we do begin, always unwittingly, to reproduce them, something may always go awry (and that is a second sense of their enactment). And yet, in the course of this reproduction, some weakness of the norm is revealed, or another set of cultural conventions intervenes to produce confusion or conflict within a field of norms, or, in the midst of our enactment, another desire starts to govern, and forms of resistance develop, something new occurs, not precisely what was planned. The apparent aim of a gender interpellation even at the earliest stages may well eventuate in a fully different aim being realized. That “turning” of the aim happens in the midst of enactment: we find ourselves doing something else, doing ourselves in a way that was not exactly what anyone had in mind for us.

Although there are authoritative discourses on gender—the law, medicine, and psychiatry, to name a few—and they seek to launch and sustain human life within discrete gendered terms, they do not always succeed in containing the effects of those discourses of gender they bring into play. Moreover, it turns out that there can be no reproduction of gendered norms without the bodily enactment of those norms, and when that field of norms breaks open, even if provisionally, we see that the animating aims of a regulatory discourse, as it is enacted bodily, give rise to consequences that are not always foreseen, making room for ways of living gender that challenge prevailing norms of recognition. Thus we can plainly see the emergence of transgender, genderqueer, butch, femme, and hyperbolic or dissident modes of masculinity and femininity, and even zones of gendered life that are opposed to all categorical distinctions such as these. Some years ago, I tried to locate in gender performativity a form of inadvertent agency, one that was certainly not outside of all culture, power, and discourse, but that emerged, importantly, from within its terms, its unforeseeable deviations, establishing cultural possibilities that confounded the sovereign aims of all those institutional regimes, including parenting structures, that seek to know and normalize gender in advance.

So, first and foremost, to say that gender is performative is to say that it is a certain kind of enactment; the “appearance” of gender is often mistaken as a sign of its internal or inherent truth; gender is prompted by obligatory norms that demand that we become one gender or the other (usually within a strictly binary frame); the reproduction of gender is thus always a negotiation with power; and finally, there is no gender without this reproduction of norms that in the course of its repeated enactments risks undoing or redoing the norms in unexpected ways, opening up the possibility of remaking gendered reality along new lines. The political aspiration of this analysis, perhaps its normative aim, is to let the lives of gender and sexual minorities become more possible and more livable, for bodies that are gender nonconforming as well as those that conform too well (and at a high cost) to be able to breathe and move more freely in public and private spaces, as well as all those zones that cross and confound those two. Of course, the theory of gender performativity that I formulated never prescribed which gender performances were right, or more subversive, and which were wrong, and reactionary, even when it was clear that I valued the breakthrough of certain kinds of gender performances into public space, free of police brutality, harassment, criminalization, and pathologization. The point was precisely to relax the coercive hold of norms on gendered life—which is not the same as transcending or abolishing all norms—for the purposes of living a more livable life. This last is a normative view not in the sense that it is a form of normality, but only in the sense that it represents a view of the world as it should be. Indeed, the world as it should be would have to safeguard breaks with normality, and offer support and affirmation for those who make those breaks.

Perhaps it is possible to see how precarity has always been in this picture, since gender performativity was a theory and a practice, one might say, that opposed the unlivable conditions in which gender and sexual minorities live (and sometimes also those gender majorities who “passed” as normative at very high psychic and somatic costs). “Precarity” designates that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support more than others, and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death. As I mentioned earlier, precarity is thus the differential distribution of precariousness. Populations that are differentially exposed suffer heightened risk of disease, poverty, starvation, displacement, and vulnerability to violence without adequate protection or redress. Precarity also characterizes that politically induced condition of maximized vulnerability and exposure for populations exposed to arbitrary state violence, to street or domestic violence, or other forms not enacted by states but for which the judicial instruments of states fail to provide sufficient protection or redress. So by using the term precarity, we may be referring to populations who starve or who are near starvation, those whose food sources arrive one day but not the next or are carefully rationed—as we see when the state of Israel decides how much food Palestinians in Gaza need to survive—or any number of global examples where housing is temporary or lost. We might also be talking about transgendered sex workers who have to defend themselves against street violence and police harassment. And sometimes these are the same groups, and sometimes they are different. But when they are part of the same population, they are linked by their sudden or protracted subjection to precarity, even if they do not want to acknowledge this bond.

In this way, precarity is, perhaps obviously, directly linked with gender norms, since we know that those who do not live their genders in intelligible ways are at heightened risk for harassment, pathologization, and violence. Gender norms have everything to do with how and in what way we can appear in public space, how and in what way the public and private are distinguished, and how that distinction is instrumentalized in the service of sexual politics. By asking who will be criminalized on the basis of their public appearance, I mean, who will be treated as a criminal, and produced as a criminal (which is not always the same as being named a criminal by a code of law that discriminates against manifestations of certain gender norms or certain sexual practices); who will fail to be protected by the law or, more specifically, the police, on the street, or on the job, or in the home—in legal codes or religious institutions? Who will become the object of police violence? Whose claims of injury will be refused, and who will be stigmatized and disenfranchised at the same time that they become the object of fascination and consumer pleasure? Who will have medical benefits before the law? Whose intimate and kinship relations will be recognized before the law or criminalized by the law, or who will find themselves within a space of traveling fifteen miles a new subject of rights or a criminal? The legal status of many relatio...