Judith Butler has taken her previous work on gender performativity and extended it to a general theory of ‘precarity’ and those who live in precarious situations.  On the one hand, gender performativity contests “unlivable conditions in which gender and sexual minorities” — and sometimes even majorities – live (p.  33). Such unlivable conditions come at high psychosomatic costs for individuals.  ‘Precarity,’ on the other hand, “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” (p.  33).  While there is an array of topics/concepts covered, it is livability and the interdependency of individuals (to each other as well as the natural and built environments) that are the focal points in this book and that tie everything together.  Within this, there is an emphasis on the ‘body’ and ‘assembly;’ with these two concepts, Butler moves from a more individual form of agency/action, to a pluralist account of agency amongst individuals that might not normally see themselves as similar in any way.  Butler’s usage of the body is one of the true gems in her work.  While she adequately expresses the symbolic aspect of the body in that assemblies of bodies embody a right to a political claim — the right(s) to recognition, to appear, to livability (a life free of socially and economically produced struggle) — she also extensively expresses the all-too-often forgotten importance of the corporeal aspect of the body.  For as the body can exemplify performativity in an ‘atypically’ discursive fashion by its mere presence at a gathering — an assembly — and stand (figuratively and literally) to assert the rights of recognition and appearance, the body also needs the means to actually appear.

The field of appearance, and therefore the right to appear, is highly regulated by norms of recognition and unduly affects one’s right to be recognized (as a subject, citizen, individual) and to appear at all. “And this means that embodying the norm or norms by which one gains recognizable status is a way of ratifying and reproducing certain norms of recognition over others, and so constraining the field of the recognizable” (p.  35).  The body and assembly are thus means to battle the “modes of power that seek to normalize certain versions of the human over others” (37).  As appearance has at the very least two meanings, it is not just the visual, embodied (or rejected) aspect of norms, but the actual ability to appear at a given place at a given time — to mobilize.  The body and assembly are “a plural and performative positing of eligibility where it did not exist before” (p.  50), acting against the “differential forms of power that qualify who can and cannot appear” (p.  50).  The body needs its ‘needs’ to be met that will allow an individual to physically take part in the act of resistance towards precarity that is embodied through ‘assembly.’  To be adequately fed, sheltered, rested, educated, etc. are all necessary requirements not only of a livable life, but of action.  Butler aptly remarks:  “Living and acting are bound together in such a way that the conditions that make it possible for anyone to live are part of the very object of political reflection and action” (p.  44).   Furthermore, “We cannot act without supports, and yet we must struggle for the supports that allow us to act or, indeed, that are essential components of our action” (p.  72). 

It is in these senses, among others, that Butler not only critiques Hannah Arendt’s notions of the body, assembly, action, and the public sphere, but advances them.  Unlike Arendt, Butler views the public and private spheres as interdependent, and in a sense, one in the same.  The sustenance of the body (which occurs privately) allows the actor to act publically and through verbal speech (Arendt’s notion of action).  For Butler the “well-fed body speaks openly and publicly” (p.  206), and in her view, “the concerted action that characterizes resistance is sometimes found in the verbal speech act or the heroic fight, but it is also found in those bodily gestures of refusal, silence, movement, and refusal to move” (p.  218).  Moreover, through the body and assembly, Butler emphatically, yet simply attributes a great deal of agency to individuals, while never forgetting the critical role that structures play in society and the limiting force they have on agency.   It is not that she claims to bridge the divide or attempts to rehash the age-old structure/agency debate, but rather that she does not overcomplicate the way in which individuals enact agency.  Indeed, as Butler views precarity to be differentially distributed, she never loses sight of intersectionality and the way in which power dynamics unduly affect some more than others.  Yet, she all the while maintains that “the rights for which we struggle are plural rights, and that plurality is not circumscribed in advance by identity, that is, it is not a struggle to which only some identities can belong” (p.  66).  While precarity or being precarious does not create an identity per se, it is an alliance that creates solidarity through an emotional connection, or in other words, empathy, by way of living an unlivable life, being destitute, or “[living] a slow death” (p.  69).  As Butler notes, “This is a felt sense that is at once singular and plural” (p.  69).  By bringing forth this emotional aspect to the table, Butler again adds to the uniqueness of this book.  In line with this, Butler disputes notions of proximity, as is commonly associated with nationalism/communitarianism, as being integral to alliances and bonds of solidarity.  Relying on human interdependency again and the imperative of being ethically and morally bound to one another, Butler denounces the supposed necessity of proximity for solidarity, stating that “everyone is precarious, and this follows from our social existence as bodily beings who depend upon one another for shelter and sustenance and who, therefore, are at risk” (p.  118) of becoming precarious from failing institutions, infrastructure, and other social/economic relationships that intertwine us all in the dimension of politics, near and far.  This is brought on by the urgency to affirm an understanding of interdependency that realizes the ‘unchosen’ aspect of cohabitation, but one that is nonetheless rooted in egalitarian values.  For “it is only when we understand that what happens there also happens here, and that ‘here’ is already an elsewhere, and necessarily so, that we stand a chance of grasping the difficult and shifting global connections in ways that let us know the transport and constraint of what me might still call ethics” (p.  122). 

This is once more affirmed and elaborated on by Butler’s view of vulnerability, which is not seen as ontological, essential, or foundational, but rather as “unequally distributed effects of a field of power that acts on and through bodies” (p.  145).  Because the body or bodies are relational, whether it be socially, economically, infrastructurally, technologically, etc., vulnerability always resides simultaneously within and outside the body.  The body is not distinct from the given historical situation in which it resides, and in that sense, neither is vulnerability.  Moreover, while the body is exposed to precarity, force, and history, it is also exposed to passion, love, and loss.  While not knowing what will happen in advance makes everyone vulnerable to varying degrees, it is this “vulnerability [that] implicates us in what is beyond us yet part of us, constituting one central dimension of what might tentatively be called our embodiment” (p.  149).  Importantly, however, is the idea that through the body, we may feel what other bodies feel or have felt (e.g. photos of the destruction of war), in effect aiding in alliance and solidarity, which is why Butler claims that the regulation of senses is a political matter (p.  149).  Vulnerability thus marks the human experience, necessitating our dependency on others, a sustainable world, and understanding ourselves as emotional, sexual beings whose flourishing or struggling is interconnected and dependent on various structures that enable or inhibit livability (p.  150). 

While keeping with livability and interdependency as central themes, the focus then turns to Adorno’s notion of the ‘good life,’ which Butler ultimately lengthens to mean a ‘livable life.’  Butler reads Adorno to have stressed that a ‘good life’ is difficult to lead in that it is inextricably tied up with social structures (i.e. a broader world) that induce inequality, exploitation, non-recognition, etc. (i.e. a ‘bad’ life) (p.  193).  For Butler, this is precarity, and in re-addressing the unequal distribution thereof, she emphasizes the various power dynamics at play that affect morality and social conditions.  In this, the body is a way of persisting and resisting, yet in order to persist and resist, the body must have its needs met to survive.  However, merely surviving is not the same as living a livable life, as Butler aptly states:  “One can survive without being able to live one’s life” (p.  209).

In relating assembly to popular sovereignty and acts of self-naming (e.g. ‘we the people’), Butler acknowledges that “no one popular assembly comes to represent the entirety of the people, but each positing of the people through assembly risks or invites a set of conflicts that, in turn, prompt a growing set of doubts about who the people really are” (p.  156).  Butler states that the “assembly is already speaking before it utters any words, that by coming together it is already an enactment of a popular will” (p.  156) and that when and where a declaration of popular sovereignty is made, “it is not exactly at a single instance, but instead in a series of speech acts or what [she] would suggest are performative enactments that are not restrictively verbal” (176).  In this, popular sovereignty remains distinct from state sovereignty for popular sovereignty has the capability of legitimating or contesting regimes of power.  “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” (p.  162).  Acknowledging that interdependency, not only amongst humans, but of all creatures, natural and built environments, and institutions, is necessary to livability, the body becomes a source of performative action, and assembly its plural manifestation, to battle precarity in a radically democratic fashion.

This latest work by Judith Butler is recommendable for many reasons, one of which is its applicability and relevance to scholars from many different disciplines (within and outside the social sciences and humanities); it can be used as a bridge and steppingstone for many different avenues and advancements.  However, there seems to be a lot ambiguity and implicit assumptions left for the reader.  One is that ‘precarity’ is both generalized, yet made specific to certain populations.  For if, as Butler states, ‘everyone is precarious’ (p.  118), it runs the risk of becoming meaningless.  Secondly, the mainly philosophical approach lacks a lot of supporting evidence of the patterns she observes, making her arguments speculative.  Another concern is how much of what Butler is stating is ‘old news’ wrapped in new language?  For instance, it is unclear as to how much ‘precarity’ actually differs from Marx’s ‘alienation.’  As well, regarding the body, there is a lack of (explicit) distinction from or connection to previous work by other scholars in various disciplines within the social sciences and humanities.  Additionally, other readers might find problematic the banality of many of her arguments, especially towards ‘vulnerability.’  While I would disagree with this, for anything that is seemingly banal should always be explicated beyond its surface, Butler might have done well to defend this a bit more.

© 2016 Joe Schuldt

Joe Schuldt (PhD Candidate, University College Dublin).