Tunnel Reading

Dispossession: The Performative in the Political by Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou (chapter 20: The university, the humanities, and the book bloc and chapter 21: Spaces of appearance, politics of exposure)

190 The university, the humanities, and the book bloc JB: Of course, in earlier times, so many people would have been critical of books such as Derrida’s. Will it give us the tools we need to do politics? Is it suffi ciently political? But now there is the pressing question of whether there will be institutional sites where such debates can be had, and whether the opportunity to read books such as Derrida’s will still be possible. It may be that knowledge will begin even more radically to circulate outside the university, and though there are many reasons to wish for the displacement of the uni- versity as the center for knowledge, it would be an unimaginable loss for the university to become a priva- tized industry that mainly trains its students for market- able pursuits. Where and when do we engage in any criticism of market values themselves, of the contingent and restrictive model of rationality now traveling under the name of neoliberalism? We are in a terrible conun- drum when in order to underscore the importance of critical theory and critical thinking more generally, we have to “prove its marketability.” It is unfortunately all too familiar to consider a market argument for betting against the market (that happens all the time), but does critical theory need to analogize itself to betting against the stock market in order to be sustained as a funded dimension of the university? In a way, we are waging a fi ght over values in a fi eld in which the market seeks to be the only measure of value. My sense is that this is one reason people have taken to the streets. For the problem, as you know, is not only that critical thinking risks becoming unfundable within institutions driven by market values, but that basic rights and entitlements are also eroded within such a context, refashioned as “investments” or as “disposable goods.” 191 The university, the humanities, and the book bloc In a way, the situation of non-tenured academic workers forms a bridge between the institutional crisis of knowledge and the production of disposable popula- tions. For those who can and will teach the humanities, languages, or critical thinking may well be understood as classes of workers that are substitutable. In the United States the number of academic workers without security of employment has grown exponentially in recent years. And when state law or union regulations demand that non-tenured faculty become eligible for reviews that would establish security of employment, employers very often refuse to renew the contracts, letting workers go right before the moment in which they stand a chance of securing their futures. So we see how universities are actively participating in deciding which population of workers will be disposable, and which will not. And students who are coming up through the university, watching language classes being cut, fi nding themselves in over-enrolled courses or shut out of their majors, also recognize that their lives and educations are being sac- rifi ced for a set of market calculations. When universi- ties become unaffordable, as is increasingly the case in the United States, we see as well the university as a site that reproduces and hardens rigid class stratifi cations. So, do we wonder that students and workers are taking to the streets, fi nding alliances with one another, and that university buildings are being seized or occu- pied in an effort to draw media attention to the ques- tion: Who can fi nd entry into the halls of the university? Indeed, the questions are many: Who can afford to go? Who can afford to teach there at wages that are not sustaining? And who can afford to live out a life in which one’s labor is disposable and the worth of one’s 192 The university, the humanities, and the book bloc knowledge is unrecognizable by prevailing market standards? The result is surely rage, but perhaps we can ask more precisely how to make sense of bodies that assemble on the street, or that occupy buildings, or that fi nd themselves gathering in public squares or along the routes that line the center of cities?

193 21 Spaces of appearance, politics of exposure AA: My sense is that our conversation, Judith, perhaps in its entirety, has been insistently gesturing toward the question – and the affective labor – of critical agency, in its entwinement with multiple forms of doing, undoing, being undone, and becoming, as well as mul- tiple forms of giving and giving up. In seeking to map out a differential and multi-sited topology of radical transformational action, we have dealt with the ques- tion of how present regimes of dispossession are dis- placed into a labor of sensing, imagining, envisaging, and forging an alternative to the present. As we are affected by dispossession, the affect of dispossession is not quite our own. And as we are rendered vulnerable to another’s dispossession, or to another dispossession, we engage in a commonality of political resistance and transformative action – albeit not letting our affective alliances cede to claims of similitude and community. And so our main concern has been the processes by which embodied subjects, simultaneously produced and foreclosed via the violence of neo-colonial, capitalist, 194 Spaces of appearance, politics of exposure racial, gendered, and sexualized regulatory schemas, present themselves in their erasure. This is about the challenge of taking into account the politics of precari- ous and dispossessed subjectivity, in claiming the right and the desire to a political otherwise. In seeking to make sense of the potentialities of bodies that assemble on the streets and squares of the world, or fi ght street battles over public education, we can also track how these multi-sited aggregations might serve not to reinsert a nostalgic communitarian politics of place, but rather to displace conventional concep- tions of the “public sphere,” or the polis, understood as the particular spatial location of political life. The per- spective of an affective politics of the performative that we are pursuing here clearly resonates with Arendt’s formulation of the “space of appearance” 1 that is brought into being through political action. For our purposes here, we might fi nd it useful to shift from spaces of appearance to spacing appearance . In this context, the notion of space should by no means be taken as synonymous with fi xity, but rather implies a performative plane of “taking place.” In this sense, “appearance” is not reducible to a surface phenomenal- ity; rather it opens up to concern what is performed in ways that avow the unperformable. I guess there is a set of questions here: How does “appearance” relate to “spacing,” “taking space,” and “taking place” when it comes to bodies on the streets? How could appearance relate to exposure – exposure to the violence of the polis but also exposure to others, other places, and other politics? But if there can be no realm of appearance possible apart from social normativity and thus from imposed 195 Spaces of appearance, politics of exposure invisibleness, the challenge is to mobilize “appearance” without taking for granted its naturalized epistemolo- gical premises – visibility, transparency – that have been abundantly used to reify political subjectivity. It is through stabilizing norms of gender, sexuality, national- ity, raciality, able-bodiedness, land and capital owner- ship that subjects are interpellated to fulfi ll the conditions of possibility for their appearance to be recognized as human. Can “anybody” (any body) appear then? How do particular forms of corporeal engagement become available to the normative cultures of intelligibility, sen- sibility, and livability? This question of who can appear gets complicated, and occasionally gets into trouble, when a realm of appearance comes face to face with an uncanny stranger whose appearance and claim to public space are taken to yield a dissonance; it also gets com- plicated when an assembly is faced with the disjunctive performative force of sheer socio-historical specifi city. Consider, for example, that the protest encampment at the University of New Mexico is called “( Un )occupy Albuquerque” to highlight the fact that the land there is occupied native land. I would say that this is, indeed, a particularly creative dissonance, one that renders the very conceptual grounds of “occupation” accountable to historical difference and thus to its own material conditions of possibility. I think we might think of this openness to possibility as crucial to the desire for the event of radical, agonistic democracy. JB: In some ways, the question is too large, since there are all kinds of assemblies: the revolutionary assemblies in Tunisia and Egypt, the demonstrations against edu- cational cuts, and against the emerging hegemony of 196 Spaces of appearance, politics of exposure neoliberalism in higher education that we have seen in Athens, Rome, London, Wisconsin, and Berkeley, to name but a few. And then there are the demonstrations that are without immediate demands, such as Occupy Wall Street, and then, of course, there are the riots in the UK, which are also without explicit demands, but the political signifi cance of which cannot be underesti- mated when we consider the extent of poverty and unemployment among those who were looting. When people take to the streets together, they form something of a body politic, and even if that body politic does not speak in a single voice – even when it does not speak at all – it still forms, asserting its presence as a plural and obdurate bodily life. What is the political signifi cance of assembling as bodies, stopping traffi c or claiming attention, or moving not as stray and separated indi- viduals, but as a social movement of some kind? It does not have to be organized from on high (the Leninist presumption), and it does not need to have a single message (the Logocentric conceit), for assembled bodies to exercise a certain performative force in the public domain. The “We are here” that translates that collec- tive bodily presence might be re-read as “We are still here,” meaning: “We have not yet been disposed of. We have not slipped quietly into the shadows of public life: we have not become the glaring absence that structures your public life.” In a way, the collective assembling of bodies is an exercise of the popular will, and a way of asserting, in bodily form, one of the most basic presup- positions of democracy, namely that political and public institutions are bound to represent the people, and to do so in ways that establish equality as a presupposition of social and political existence. So when those 197 Spaces of appearance, politics of exposure institutions become structured in such a way that certain populations become disposable, are interpellated as dis- posable, deprived of a future, of education, of stable and fulfi lling work, of even knowing what one can call a home, then surely the assemblies fulfi ll another func- tion, not only the expression of justifi able rage, but the assertion in their very social organization of principles of equality. Bodies on the street are precarious – they are exposed to police force and sometimes endure physi- cal suffering as a result. But those bodies are also obdu- rate and persisting, insisting on their continuing and collective “thereness” and, in these recent forms, organ- izing themselves without hierarchy, thus exemplifying the principles of equal treatment that they are demand- ing of public institutions. In this way, those bodies enact a message, performatively, even when they sleep in public, even when they organize collective methods for cleaning the grounds they occupy, as happened in Tahrir Square and on Wall Street. If there is a crowd, there is also a media event that forms across time and space, calling for the demonstrations, so some set of global connections is being articulated, a different sense of the global from the “globalized market.” And some set of values is being enacted in the form of a collective resist- ance: a defense of our collective precarity and persist- ence in the making of equality and the many-voiced and unvoiced ways of refusing to become disposable.