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Monday, October 24, 2011

Judith Butler at the People's Mic



Transcript:

I came here to lend my support for you today, to offer my solidarity, for this unprecedented display of democracy and popular will. People have asked, "So, what are the demands? What are the demands all these people are making?" Either they say there are no demands, and that leaves your critics confused, or they say that the demands for social equality and economic justice are impossible demands and impossible demands, they say, are just not practical. If hope is an impossible demand, then we demand the impossible. If the right to food and shelter and employment are impossible demands, then we demand the impossible. If it is impossible to demand that those who profit from the Recession redistribute their wealth and cease their greed, then, yes, we demand the impossible. But it is true, there are no demands that you can submit to arbitration here, because we're not just demanding economic justice and social equality, we are assembling in public, we are coming together as bodies in alliance, in the street and in the square. We are standing here together, making democracy, enacting the phrase, "We the People." Thank you!

Comments:

It's a lovely little paragraph, devoted to two key observations. The first is by now familiar, dispensing with the nonsense that the Occupiers make no demands when it is so obvious to everybody the flabbergasting injustice to which the Occupiers are responding, just as it is obvious what, as a general matter, the proper response to this obvious injustice should be.

The point of framing demands in terms of "the impossible" here, I am supposing, is that the response is so far from mysterious or impossible, indeed, to italicize how everything is frankly obvious and easy and modest. It is obvious, of course, that we must at the very least redistribute insanely concentrated wealth -- especially given the fraud and dysfunction that still enables this concentration under the present circumstances -- at least enough to provide all citizens with food and shelter and livelihood. This is the farthest imaginable thing from an impossible demand: if anything it is a heartbreakingly modest way to define social equality and economic justice. And this is what critics would declare incomprehensible or impossible, of all things?

The second observation Butler makes is a little less commonplace, and to me just as if not finally more important. In describing the Occupation in terms of "bodies in alliance," for one thing, Butler connects the observation about the nature of the demands being made to a vital reminder about the substance of the political as such. In Occupying "the street, the square" these spaces are transformed not only physically but in their meaning. Spaces that were devoted to the business of maintaining an unfair, inequitable, exploitative status quo become spaces in which people also protest and contest that business.

And as is by now well known, public discourse across layers of Establishment Media and among elected representatives and variously celebrated figures has transformed the space of public discourse in response to this transformation of public space. Where pundits and politicians had been talking for months about the surreally misplaced "priority" of dealing with long term deficits by cutting spending on services and supports for those who are suffering here and now in their millions because of the misconduct of elites, suddenly pundits and politicians are talking instead about the crisis of joblessness, the suffering of the long-term unemployed and those who have lost their homes due to predatory lending practices, and about the continued affluence of bad actors in this recession paid for by their victims in the midst of their ongoing distress.

Through the transformation of the spaces that have enabled "Business As Usual" into spaces that also attest to recognition of and resistance to this rank bloodyminded business the whole discursive- practical- institutional- tissue out of which "Demands" are made and heard and translated into actions in the first place has been transformed in mere weeks.

Critics wish to denigrate a lack of demands! It is precisely the lack of efficacious demand that is being filled, the better to be fulfilled, with the filling of the street and the square with these "bodies in alliance."

This leads to Butler's celebration in her brief statement of politics in the Arendtian sense. Politics for Hannah Arendt -- the politics Butler is discerning and enjoying in company with the Occupiers of Wall Street -- is never properly reducible to the instrumental business of translating means unilaterally and unanimously into ends. For Arendt, the essence of political power and of freedom is not a matter of capacitation, an enhancement of our force to accomplish business, but refers to an enacted state of legibility, of meaningfulness, of legitimacy, of real pleasure that can only emerge peer-to-peer, fragile, even evanescent, in "the space of appearances," as it were, "in the street and in the square," one of a number of states, not all of them political in this sense, without which we are not fully human beings.

That we testify to our hopes and our histories in the presence of our fellows yields history-transforming results in the world, victories, implementations, works, monuments... but we are wrong when we are so distracted by such results that we fail to grasp that the substance of our freedom and our political power is already materialized in the testament, the tale, the judgment itself, offered up in the midst of a diversity of "bodies in alliance."

Bodies in alliance form a body in turn, an assembly, a congress: they body forth the equity-in diversity of folks ineradicably different in their situations and capacities and aspirations, and yet "coming together" "standing together" as peers, as sharers of a world and of a moment, offering up judgments and expressions of creativity and, yes, of demands, too.

"Power springs up whenever people get together and act in concert," writes Arendt in her Reflections on Violence and this power is not in political terms most essentially a means to an end (even if co-ordination and collaboration obviously can and does arise out of such collectivity to yield desirable ends that are otherwise unattainable) but an "end in itself."

While it is true, and obviously true, that critics who claim confusion as to the "Demands" of the Occupiers are mischievously denying the obvious, the better to deny the equally obvious reasonableness and realizability of these obvious demands, Butler is also insisting, even in such a brief statement, that we would be profoundly wrong in speaking of demands to miss the obvious vitality and power of this "unprecedented display of democracy" on its own terms, in its beauty as it plays out here and now.

It is in the coming-together in resistance to injustice, it is in the emergence of a world otherwise in spaces once defined by injustice, it is in the transformation of the contours of deliberation and the terms in which demands can legibly be made and the significance of events judged, it is in the palpable pleasure of citizens and strangers connecting and disputing and building in their differences that much of the power and the freedom of the Occupation substantially consists. It is the materialization of "We The People" who will make demands, who will judge events, who will have a say in public decisions that affect their lives, who will criticize public figures, who will re-make what democracy means now, who will declare "this is what democracy looks like," who will re-make and so "make democracy" "in the street, in the square" itself. Demands are made and heard and enacted and reacted to in a world -- and the Occupiers are not just making demands but re-making the world in which demands are made.

I think this is what Judith Butler is trying to draw our attention to most of all in her brief statement.

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