Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly

by Judith Butler

A Times Higher Education Book of the Week

Judith 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 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

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Nonfiction, Theory, Feminism, Academic, Queer

256 pages, Paperback

First published November 17, 2015

About the author

Judith Butler is an American philosopher, feminist, and queer theorist whose work has profoundly shaped gender studies, political philosophy, ethics, psychoanalysis, and literary theory. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, to a Hungarian-Jewish and Russian-Jewish family, Butler was raised in a Jewish cultural and ethical environment that fostered an early engagement with philosophy, ethics, and questions of identity, attending Hebrew school and specialized ethics classes as a teenager. They studied philosophy at Bennington College before transferring to Yale University, where they earned a BA in 1978 and a PhD in 1984, focusing on German idealism, phenomenology, and French theory, including Hegel, Sartre, and Kojève. Butler taught at Wesleyan University, George Washington University, and Johns Hopkins University before joining the University of California, Berkeley in 1993, where they co-founded the Program in Critical Theory, served as Maxine Elliot Professor, directed the International Consortium of Critical Theory, and also hold the Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School. Butler is best known for Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, works in which they introduced the theory of gender performativity, arguing that gender is constituted through repeated social acts rather than a fixed identity, a concept that became foundational in feminist and queer theory. They have also published Excitable Speech, examining hate speech and censorship, Precarious Life, analyzing vulnerability and political violence, Undoing Gender, on the social construction of sexual norms, Giving an Account of Oneself, exploring ethical responsibility and the limits of self-knowledge, and Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, addressing public protest and collective action, while their 2020 book, The Force of Nonviolence, emphasizes ethical engagement in social and political struggles. Butler has engaged in global activism, supporting LGBTQIA rights, opposing anti-gender ideology, advocating for Palestinian rights, critiquing aspects of contemporary Israeli policy, and participating in movements such as Occupy Wall Street, while navigating controversies including critiques of their comments on Hamas and Hezbollah, debates over TERF ideology, and disputes over the Adorno Prize, illustrating the intersections of their scholarship and public interventions. Their work extends into ethical theory, exploring vulnerability, interdependence, mourning, and the recognition of marginalized lives, as well as the performative dimensions of identity and the social construction of sex and gender. They have influenced contemporary feminist, queer, and critical theory, cultural studies, and continental philosophy, shaping debates on gender, sexuality, power, and social justice, while also participating in public discourse and advocacy around education, political violence, and anti-discrimination. Butler is legally non-binary in California, uses they/them pronouns, identifies as a lesbian, and lives in Berkeley with their partner Wendy Brown and their son.

Reviews

[Dandi]

Response paper for class
********************

In this response, I aim to think through the keyword “appear” (and two other related keywords, briefly) in Judith Butler’s Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly. This is crucial to the project of self-revision that she seems to enact with this text.

In Chapter 1, Butler makes use of the two different meanings of “appear” in order to connect her earlier work on gender performance and formation to her more recent work on the conditions of precarity in vulnerable populations. She uses “appear” in the sense that the freedom to assemble is the freedom to appear together in what she argues are performative acts of resistance, and also in the sense of physical appearance, of which gender expression and performance is a prime example. This serves as an apt complement to her elaboration of the word “performative,” which she notes in “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” “carries the double-meaning of ‘dramatic’ and ‘non-referential’” (464), especially since saying something “appears to be” one way or the other can imply that its appearance is deceiving, much in the same way that “dramatic” implies an exaggeration of some notion of truth.

Butler also calls into question whether the “right to appear” is inherently desirable; after all, “[a]s much as recognition seems to be a precondition of livable life, it can serve the purposes of scrutiny, surveillance, and normalization from which a queer escape may prove necessary precisely to achieve livability outside of its norms” (62). In this sentence, it’s unclear to me whether Butler is arguing that one must first accept the surveilling violences of recognition before leaving it behind in order for that lack of recognition to be livable (i.e. it’s not so much the lack of present-tense recognition by dominant regimes that makes for precarity and an unlivable existence, but rather the never-having-been-recognized), or simply that it is often the case that striving for recognition comes at the price of assimilation and surveillance. The first of these interpretations would imply a notable temporality about recognition and incorporation—to appear once is to have always already appeared, such that even a “queer escape” from that appearance is necessarily predicated on that appearance. We can think of this kind appearance, that which is made available for “scrutiny, surveillance, and normalization,” as operating with a similar grammar as “being disappeared.” To be appeared, then, can perhaps be thought of as being subjected to the force of a dominant regime’s gaze and calculations.

I am conflating appearance and recognition in linking the discussion of “appear” to this quote, which may itself be imprecise—“to appear to” might be equivalent to “to recognize,” since there is a person/group to whom something appears, but “to appear” by itself can perhaps be simply appearing to oneself or selves, rather than to a group which recognizes that appearance. I’m thinking (and this may be an ill-formed connection, especially since this example is fictive and also operates more at the level of the individual than any of the examples provided by Butler) of Beloved’s “appearance” out of the water in Morrison’s novel—though her appearance in corporeal form seems to signify some kind of concretization of the haunting of 124, she isn’t immediately recognized by anyone as being that incarnation until much later.

In this newer text, the focus of the discussion on gender performance is always about the appearance of the queerly performing body in public. Butler revises her earlier account of the performativity of gender as “a stylized repetition of acts” (Butler 1988 462, emphasis in original), which can too easily be relegated to the realm of individual choice and action, by specifying that the performativity “presumes a field of appearance in which gender appears” (Butler 2015 38). Both “field” and “appearance” are significant in the context of this argument and this piece, “field” because it functions here not merely as an abstract spatial metaphor but literally as the public space to which Butler argues assemblies performatively lay claim (41) and “appearance” for the reasons stated above. The emphasis on specifically public forms of appearance is the crux of Butler’s revision here, both of her own work and, in the context of our class, of other notions of “togetherness” or “solidarity” that have been presented in both the literary and theoretical texts we have read. While other formulations of a “we” may imply a public-facing dimension, nowhere is it as explicit as it is in this piece. And in some texts, the very conditions of the existence of that “we” are precisely its positioning outside of the public. “There is an ‘us’?” Offred asks in Episode 2 of Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale, when told of the handmaids’ resistance, because to appear, to assert that “us” publicly in the world of the handmaids, would be to be appeared more intensely and violently to the panoptic governing powers constantly at play.

A quick consideration of two related keyword in the text. Firstly, “assembly,” which on the one hand means “a public gathering” and on the other means “putting together.” Some assembly, in both senses of the word, is required for a “we” to appear in public, though the very construction of the first clause of this sentence in some ways betrays Butler’s assertion that the assembly is not prior to or even exactly a prerequisite of public appearance, but rather that the assembly is itself that appearance. An unlikely sister keyword to “assembly” is “creature,” which Butler aligns with the act of living (39) at the same time that she uses it to call the reader’s attention to the variable and indeterminate status of the human, particularly in relation to non-human animals. The notion of “creation” (that is, as construction, in contradistinction to “birth”) implicit in “creature” perhaps signals Butler’s interest in extending her formulation of performative appearing to the realm of the non-human.

[Camisoy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brillante

[Boka · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some very interesting and inspiring ideas, but also somewhat incoherent and redundant at times.

[Guilherme Smee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eu estava enrolando para comprar e para ler esse novo livro da Bubu, a Judith Butler, porque me parecia que não envolvia suas teorias de gênero. Mas estava enganado. Em face á onda de protestos públicos e massivos que vêm acontecendo desde o começo desta década, com destaque à Primavera Árabe, Butler se preocupou, então a juntar suas teorias de performatividade de gênero com a aliança dos corpos em protesto e às políticas e as éticas envolvidas nas manifestações de ruas. Seu enfoque se dá, principalmente, àquelas que ela conceitua como "vidas precárias", aquelas "vidas que não são passíveis de luto" pela sociedade e que, então reivindicam seus direitos nos protestos dos movimentos sociais. No início do livro, ela explica como suas teorias da performatividade podem se envolver com os movimentos sociais. Mas com o passar das páginas do livro, o assunto dos capítulos vão se afastando dos atos performativos e se aproximando mais da ética e dos direitos que estão permeados nestes movimentos sociais e de ruas. A ponto de Butler rever uma afirmativa de Theodor Adorno e se perguntar se "é possível viver uma vida boa em uma vida ruim?". Mais uma vez, a Bubu conquista meu coração com suas palavras, me fazendo ter insights e ideias de discussões, ao mesmo tempo, me dando mais aportes para que eu possa discutir e defender meus pintos de vista de minorias culturais, sexuais e sociais.

[Stephanie Berbec · Rating 5 out of 5]

I woke up before dawn to finish Judith Butler’s most recent: Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. A timely read, for those interested, touching on both the Occupy and Black Lives Matter movements. Butler expounds upon her work of gender performativity to develop a performative theory of assembly — of nonviolent forms of resistance, public protest, of standing in the street, enacting together the phrase “we the people,” of what we mean when we say “we,” of using one’s body on behalf of another, of interdependency and solidarity, as well as considering those who stand outside the frame, who aren’t represented, who are kept hidden from view, those who can’t use their bodies to appear and assemble, as also participating in a sort of performativity, in light of and despite their conditions of precarity.

**Update: currently re-reading
Date started: 18 September 2016
Date ended: TBA

[Nataliia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Я читала цю книжку більше року з великими перервами, хоч вона й дуже мені подобалась. Врешті дочитати допомогло ведення конспекту.

Я вдячна авторці, за те як вони ретельно добирають слова, хоч це й робить книжку дещо складним читанням. Мене хвилює питання прекаризації й, дивлячись у наше майбутнє, я не бачу нічого. Останній розділ цієї книжки допомагає трішки видихнути й подумати про те, що справді, ми як людські тварини страшно вразливі, але ця вразливість допомагає нам помічати несправедливість і протидіяти їй. Мене підтримує й надихає думка, якою авторка відповідають на запитання в назві останнього розділу: "як жити добре, коли жити погано". Коротка відповідь така: визнати свою залежність від інших людей, а також від мереж підтримки (соціальних і технічних) і жити разом.

Декілька цитат:


Мы не можем предполагать изолированное пространство полиса, в котором все сыты и где материальные потребности неизвестным образом удовлетворяются какими-то сторонними существами, публично непризнанными из-за своего гендера, расы или статуса. Наоборот, мы должны не просто вытащить на площадь телесные материальные нужды, но и сделать их центральным вопросом политических требований.

Нежеланная близость и невыбранное совместное проживания являются предварительными условиями нашего политического существования.

Прекариат обнажает нашу социальность — ломкие, но необходимые стороны нашей взаимозависимости.

Мы боремся в ситуации прекаризации, из-за нее и против нее. Следовательно, мы пытаемся жить вместе не из общей любви к человечеству или чистого желания мира. Мы живем вместе, поскольку у нас нет выбора (...)

Улица — не просто основание или платформа для политического требования, но и инфраструктурное благо.

Таким образом, свобода собрания — нечто отличное от конкретного права, распределяемого и защищаемого существующими национальными государствами.

Если приватизация стремится разрушить публичное пространство, то тюрьма — это последняя мера, позволяющая закрыть к нему доступ. То есть в этом смысле приватизация и тюрьма работают рука об руку, не пуская людей в места, которые, как им известно, нас самом деле их собственные.

… нам не нужны никакие более идеальные формы человеческого; скорее, нам нужно понять сложную сеть отношений, без которой нас вообще не было бы, отнестись к ней с большим вниманием.

Если я должна вести хорошую жизнь, это будет жизнь, проживаемая с другими, жизнь, которая не была бы жизнью без других; я не потеряю свое Я, которым являюсь; кем бы я ни была, я преобразуюсь своими связями с другими, поскольку моя зависимость от других и моя предрасположенность к взаимозависимости необходимы, чтобы жить — и жить хорошо.

[erich · Rating 4 out of 5]

ФУХ! мои первые основательные батлер получается..
вообще очень хорошо но иногда случается что одна и та же мысль застревает по кругу это хорошо для усвоения (спасибо теперь я могу процитировать арендт во сне) но плохо для концентрации иногда прямо мучительно
в целом здесь наверное много пересказа предыдущих штук поэтому очень эксайтед почитать прямо классику вроде frames of war а эта книжка хорошая как ликбез введение
но вообще круто конечно что вот такой дискурс на самом деле уже давно общее академическое знание

[kashmir21 · Rating 2 out of 5]

Kitapta en çok altıncı bölümü sevdim.Okuduğum için pişman değilim ama yer yer sıkıldığımı söylemeden geçemeyeceğim.

[D · Rating 3 out of 5]

Erudite writing.

Who really are 'the people'? And what operative of discursive power circumscribes 'the people' at any given moment, and for what purpose?

In a time when neoliberal economics increasingly structures public services and institutions, including schools and universities, in a time when people are losing their homes, their pensions, and prospects for work in increasing numbers, we are faced in a new way with the idea that some populations are considered disposable. These developments, bolstered by prevailing attitudes toward health insurance and social security, suggest that market rationality is deciding whose health and life should be protected and whose health and life should not. Of course, there are differences between policies that explicitly seek the deaths of certain populations and policies that produce conditions of systematic negligence that effectively let people die. Foucault helped us to articulate this distinction when he spoke of the very specific strategies of biopower, the management of life and death in ways that no longer require a sovereign who explicitly decides and enforces the question of who will live and who will die.

We are in the midst of a biopolitical situation in which diverse populations are increasingly subject to what is called 'precaritization.' Usually induced and reproduced by governmental and economic institutions, this process acclimatizes populations over time to insecurity and hopelessness; it is structured into the institutions of temporary labor and decimated social services and the general attrition of the active remnants of social democracy in favor of entrepreneurial modalities supported by fierce ideologies of individual responsibility and the obligation to maximize one's own market value as the ultimate aim in life.

Precaritization is supplemented by an understanding of precarity as effecting a change in psychic reality, as implied by Lauren Berland who suggests it implies a heightened sense of expendability or disposability that is differentially distributed throughout society.

The fantasy of an individual capable of undertaking entrepreneurial self-making under conditions of accelerating precarity, if not destitution, makes the uncanny assumption that people can, and must, act in autonomous ways under conditions where life has become unlivable. The thesis of this book is that none of us acts without the conditions to act, even though sometimes we must act to install and preserve those very conditions.

'The people' are not just produced by their vocalized claims, but also by the conditions of possibility of their appearance, and so within the visual field, and by their actions, and so as part of embodied performance.

On the one hand, everyone is dependent on social relations and enduring infrastructure to maintain a livable life, so there is no getting rid of that dependency. On the other hand, that dependency, though not the same as a condition of subjugation, can easily become one. The dependency of human creatures on sustaining and supporting infrastructural life shows that the organization of infrastructure is intimately tied with an enduring sense of individual life: how life is endured, and with what degree of suffering, livability, or hope.

In other words, no one person suffers a lack of shelter without there being a social failure to organize shelter in such a way that it is accessible to each and every person.

I suggest that the 'life' one has to lead is always a social life, implicating us in a larger social, economic, and infrastructural world that exceeds our perspective and the situated, first-person modality of ethical questioning. For this reason, I argue that ethical questions are invariable implicated in social and economic ones, although they are not extinguished by those concerns. Indeed, the very conception of human action as pervasively conditioned implies that when we ask the basic ethical and political question, how ought I to act, we implicitly reference the conditions of the world that make that act possible, or as is increasingly the case under conditions of precarity, that undermine the conditions of acting. What does it mean to act together when the conditions for acting together are devastated or falling away? Such an impasse can become the paradoxical condition of a form of social solidarity both mournful and joyful, a gathering enacted by bodies under duress or in the name of duress, where the gathering itself signifies persistence and resistance.

It is no accident that God is generally credited with the first performative: Let there be light -- and then suddenly light there is.

When up against violent attack or extreme threats, many people in the first Egyptian revolution of 2009 chanted the word silmiyya, which comes from the root ver salima, which means 'to be safe and sound,' unharmed, unimpaired, intact, and secure, but also 'blameless,' faultless, and yet also 'to be certain,' established, clearly proven. The term comes from the noun silm, which means 'peace,' but also interchangeably and significantly, 'the religion of Islam.' Most usually, the chanting of silmiyya comes across as a gentle exhortation: 'peaceful, peaceful.' The collective chant was a way of encouraging people to resist the mimetic pull of military aggression -- and the aggression of the gangs -- by keeping in mind the larger goal: radical democratic change. To be swept into a violent exchange of the moment was to lose the patience needed to realize the revolution. What interests me here is the chant, the way in which language worked not to incite an action, but to restrain one: a restraint in the name of an emerging community of equals whose primary way of doing politics would not be violence.

Our shared exposure to precarity is but one ground of our potential equality and our reciprocal obligations to produce together conditions of livable life. In avowing the need we have for one another, we avow as well basic principles that inform the social, democratic conditions of what we might still call 'the good life.' These are critical conditions of democratic life in the sense that they are part of an ongoing crisis, but also because they belong to a form of thinking and acting that responds to the urgencies of our time.

[Iván Alamillo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Me quedo con este fragmento de Butler:

“Cuando se plantea que el individuo puede hacerse cargo de sí mismo bajo condiciones de precariedad generalizada, se asume que las personas pueden (y deben) actuar de manera autónoma en una época en que la vida se ha vuelto invivible.

La interdependencia debe ser una oposición a los poderes que reparten el reconocimiento de manera diferenciada”.

[Estelle McInnis · Rating 5 out of 5]

full of rich helpful tools for deconstructing the powers that affect the forms our lives take.

[Tim · Rating 2 out of 5]

Butlers Essay-Sammlung ist eine einfache, entspannte Lesung, die insgesamt einen fast einführenden Charakter in Themen der Verwundbarkeit, Versammlung und Politikwerdung vor dem Hintergrund des Arabischen Frühling und Occupy Wallstreet hat.

Wie die meisten ihrer Texte mäandert Butler leider auch hier unfassbar häufig, wiederholt sich und kommt viel zu langsam zu den Punkten, die sie versucht zu machen. 100 Seiten weniger wären durchaus drin gewesen. Mehr und deutlichere Verweise auf ihre Bezugspunkte und Quellen auch.

Mit relativ großem Abstand sind deshalb Kapitel 3 und 4 (3. Gefährdetes Leben und die Ethik der Kohabitation und 4. Körperliche Verwundbarkeit, koalitionäre Politik) die interessantesten. Hier formuliert sie ihre Ideen am prägnantesten, arbeitet sich am saubersten an Arendt und Levinas ab und stellt ihre eigenen Unsicherheiten am deutlichsten aus.

Fazit: Butler, such dir ein strengeres Lektorat.

[Martyna · Rating 4 out of 5]

bardzo ciekawa i dająca do myślenia książka. niektóre jej aspekty były dla mnie trochę zbyt uproszczone, ale dzięki temu może być fajnym wstępem do teorii queeru. w rozdziale o ciałach i formach oporu brakowało mi perspektywy ciał niesfornych i teorii choroby, jako oporu przeciwko opresji kapitalizmu (w "how to be a person in the age of autoimmunity" i w "tender points" jest ta perspektywa dobrze opisana to tam można uzupełnić temat).
po przeczytaniu pierwszego rozdziału zaczełam czytać więcej o butler aktualnie, bo ich przemyślenia o płci bardzo rezonowały z moim agenderowym niezrozumieniem płci i odkryłam, że identyfikują się jako osoba niebinarna (z zaimkami they/them - nie używają ich jeszcze w tej książce, bo była wydana przed coming outem) i myślę, że odczytanie tego rozdziału właśnie przez pryzmat niebinarności osoby autorskiej jest bardzo ważne.

[Rhys · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Perhaps these recent assemblies prompt us to ask whether we need to revise our ideas of public space in order to take account of the forms of alliance and solidarity that are only partially dependent on the ability to appear in the public square. That was, of course, Arendt’s famous claim, that politics not only requires a space of appearance, but bodies that do appear" (p.155)

Interesting thesis of the space of appearance and the presence of the body.

[Itzam Martínez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Butler permite realizar una reflexión sobre las resistencias en una perspectiva poco habitual, desde la transformación de la fragilidad como herramienta contestataria, como posibilidad de acción. También lo hace desde la intersubjetividad, reconocimiendo el papel del espacio y el tiempo como estructuras de dominación y que necesitan apropiarse.

[William · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lots of helpful stuff here especially for thinking about assemblies and precarity. I recommend as an addition to any "theories of assemblage/assembly" reading list. A bit redundant at times and could go further with some of its answers to the questions it raises. It is a "notes toward" type text, I suppose!

[Zana · Rating 3 out of 5]

O_O

(Only read if you are already familiarised with some Arendtian ideas of assemblies, social movements, and protests. I was only interested in this as my research is on the performative politics of protest movement & the concept of trust dynamics among its participants.)

[Sevim Tezel Aydın · Rating 3 out of 5]

Judith Butler bu kitapta toplanma özgürlüğü üzerine düşüncelerini anlatmış. Halk, prekaryalık, kamusal alan, bir ifade biçimi olarak toplanma özgürlüğü üzerine zihin açıcı bir okuma oldu benim için...

[Andrea Samorini]

___________________________________
FROM BOOK: La verità quando accade. Nan Goldin (Sofia Mattioli)

[versarbre · Rating 5 out of 5]

Honestly, my first Butler. But so touching and accessible! Provocative, imaginative, and supportive!

[ػᶈᶏϾӗ]

While this book was interesting and worthwhile, I am unlikely to use it for my dissertation now. Perhaps I will return to it and give it the attention it deserves in the future.

[Joseph Sverker · Rating 5 out of 5]

This turned out to be one of my favourite Butler books. She really manages to interlink perfirmativity, embodiment and sociality with vulnerability and action in this one. Very much recommended.

[Janice · Rating 3 out of 5]

Uninteresting turn.

[Martina Neglia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Per me fondamentale, specie di questi tempi.

[Burak Yaman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Arendt, işine bak aslanım.

[Bayram Erdem · Rating 3 out of 5]

Akademik bir kitap. Kapağına ve ismine aldanmamak gerek. Toplanma özgürlüğünü bu kadar ağır bir dille anlatmanın gereği yok.

[myriam kisfaludi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Des idées très intéressantes sur la vulnérabilité, la précarité, l'exclusion, le peuple, les différentes formes de manifestation, la politique. Etude très fouillée et precise,

[Lorena Bauzán · Rating 3 out of 5]

Plantea algunas ideas interesantes pero en algún punto se torna repetitivo.

[Federico · Rating 3 out of 5]

7½

[adeline · Rating 4 out of 5]

yeah i’m catching up on a semester’s worth of reading in a week 😎