An Insurrection of Ontology?

Judith Butlers
Poetics of Politics
Posted on June 18, 2014 by driftingwanderer
Yesterday I presented at the Critical Studies Research Group conference Ontologies of Conflict. Heres what I said.
In this paper I want to spend some time thinking about the method of Judith Butler and, further, suggest that this method, rather than being independent of her
theoretical work, is instead crucial if were to come to terms with what she has to say about vulnerability. In aid of this I will draw on the work of Jacques Rancire
who, I argue, has similar methodological commitments. In particular I want to suggest that Rancires concept of a poetics of politics (2000: 115) is useful in
helping us understand what sort of claims Butler is making when she posits a generalised vulnerability that all living beings share as a consequence of our injurability.
Through an engagement with Fiona Jenkins commentary on Butler I argue that Butlers claim that she is theorising insurrection at the level of ontology (2006: 33)
is important and cannot be reduced to simply another form of ontology; or rather, we can read Butler in this way, but we lose something if we do.

Speaking in response to two highly detailed engagements with her recent work (from Catherine Mills and Fiona Jenkins), Butler begins by briefly commenting on her
own approach to theory. She says,
[...] it never occurred to me to try and establish an internally consistent philosophical position. Because I am, as I write, a living being, I develop new views, call some
of the old ones into question, change tracks, return to older problems in new ways. But I have never, I think, sought to reconcile the writing that I have done at one
time with the writing I have done at another [...] one writes and then writes again, but it is probably not the case that what one writes first serves as a set of
philosophical premises from which the later work is derived. There is perhaps a different kind of temporality at work, a circling back to issues left unprobed, new
efforts to approach a set of problems, the exercise of a certain possibility of repetition that does not seek to produce a seamless continuity between what is past and
what is present. Indeed, the discontinuities allow for the possibility of starting anew, starting again, with some of the same problems with which one began (2007:
180-181).
Similarly, in a recent article written entirely in the third person, Rancire also calls into question how and why he writes, and therefore how one might receive his
work. He says:
What [Rancire] does himself is to construct a moving map of a moving landscape, a map that is ceaselessly modified by the movement itself. This is why, indeed, his
concepts are instable: police and politics, distribution of the sensible, aesthetics, literature etc. dont mean the same thing from the beginning of the travel to the
end; firstly because the travel is a fight too, a multi-waged fight where the emphasis can be put on different aspects; secondly because the travel or the fight
continuously discovers new landscapes, paths or obstacles which oblige to reframe the conceptual net used to think where we are (2009: 120).
Are these simply the excuses of two theorists committed to the post-structuralist tradition and unwilling to engage with the thorny issues of normativity, ethics and
morality? I believe not. Instead, for both Rancire and Butler their work is not just an alternative suggestion for how the world is, but at the same time is a disruption
of how the world is already understood. There is, to use a concept that Rancire develops in dialogue with Davide Panagia, a poetics of politics (2000: 115) in both
Butlers and Rancires theorising. For Rancire, To affirm the nature of the poetic in politics means to assert first and foremost that politics is an activity of
reconfiguration of that which is given in the sensible (Ibd.). He goes on: In order to enter into political exchange, it becomes necessary to invent the scene upon
which spoken words may be audible, in which objects may be visible, and individuals themselves may be recognized. It is in this respect that we may speak of a
poetics of politics (Ibid. 116). In this way the scenes that Rancire and Butler posit of disagreement and vulnerability respectively cannot simply be substituted
for dominant understandings of how the world works, replacing, for example, communicative rationality with Rancires disagreement, or sovereign autonomy
with Butlers embodied relationality. These concepts are not offered as replacements precisely because they call into question the rationality that sustains the
concepts that they would be replacing. As a way of demonstrating this I will offer a quick overview of Butlers recent work, in particular engaging with Fiona Jenkins
reading of Butlers theorising as a form of testimony or witness-bearing.
One of Butlers central questions in her recent work, most obvious in her books Undoing Gender (2004), Precarious Life (2006) and Frames of War (2010), is when
and how we perceive certain lives as lives worth living, and when and how we perceive something which is alive as not having a life. More specifically, Butler draws
a distinction between the act of apprehension and the act of recognition: apprehension can imply marking, registering, acknowledging without full cognition (Ibid.
5) and precedes the act of recognition. It thus becomes possible to be apprehended as living without being recognised as having a life.
From this observation Butler draws a distinction between what she calls precariousness and precarity. Precariousness is, for Butler, an equal attribute that we all
share by dint of being alive as socially embodied beings, but precarity is politically differentiated. Lives that can be apprehended but not recognised are, for Butler,
exposed to a greater degree of precarity. Following from this, Butler argues that certain populations have a greater degree of precarity and are thus exposed to a greater
degree of violence.
A lot of Butlers recent work has been concerned with critically interrogating the colonialism of the Israeli state and its ongoing oppression of Palestinians. Butler
looks at the Israeli corporate medias response to the bombing of Gaza in the winter of 2008-2009 to offer one example of precarity. The Israeli media reported that
Hamas militants were hiding in locations populated by children (schools, nurseries etc.) and were thus using the children as a form of shield. In this way, so the logic
of these media commentators goes, the Israeli military were justified in bombing the members of Hamas despite the consequence of the slaughter of children. As
Butler says:
We are asked to believe that those children are not really children, are not really alive, that they have already been turned into metal, to steel, that they belong to the
machinery of bombardment, at which point the body of the child is conceived as nothing more than a militarized metal that protects the attacker against attack (Ibid.
xxvii)
She goes on:
If one were to conceptualize the child as something other than part of the defensive and manipulative machinery of war, then there would be some chance of
understanding this life as a life worth living, worth sheltering, and worth grieving. But once transformed into duplicitous shrapnel, even the Palestinian child is no
longer living, but is, rather, recognized as a threat to life (Ibid.).
For Butler, grievability is a mark that a life has been recognised as being alive. If we cannot grieve for someone we do not recognise them as fully alive. We can think
now of the populations in Iraq, whose grievability is suspended (if it was ever there in the first place) so that the corporate media can stoke the fires of intervention and
thus secure the frames of war that legitimise extreme forms of violence. As Butler says, [w]ithout grievability, there is no life, or, rather, there is something living
that is other than life (Ibid. 15).
Importantly, the shared precariousness that Butler posits cannot be understood at an individual level but needs to understood socially as a generalised condition. For
Butler,
There is no life without the conditions of life that variably sustain life, and those conditions are pervasively social, establishing not the discrete ontologyof the person,
but rather the interdependency of persons, involving reproducible and sustaining social relations, and relations to the environment and to non-human forms of life,
broadly construed (Ibid. 19).
Or, simply put, life requires support and enabling conditions in order to be a livable life (Ibid. 21).
It would be easy to read Butler as simply offering another understanding of what it is to be human by positing this understanding of vulnerability: in this light what
would be proper to the human would be its vulnerability. Catherine Mills does this when she criticises Butlers turn to nonviolence, arguing that if the human is
always vulnerable to violence indeed, if violence is a necessary part of our continuing subject formation then an ethics of nonviolence is nonsensical.
In her response to Mills, Fiona Jenkins does not so much argue against the violence that Mills characterises as being attendant to subject formation; after all, I think it
is clear that much of the violence that Mills discusses is of concern for Butler. Rather, Jenkins shifts the frame of Butlers analysis of violence, at the same time
arguing that Mills falls foul of an act of substitution, whereby Butlers account of violence and her concomitant nonviolence can simply be replaced one for the other.
In this way Jenkins argues that Butlers account of subject formation is not simply the substitution of an autonomous sovereign identity with an embodied relational
one whereby one hegemonic conception of the subject succeeds another (Jenkins 2007: 158): instead, Butlers account of embodiment and relationality cannot
operate according to the same rationalities and schemas as a liberal ontology. They require a fundamental reimagining of what it is to be human. When Butler
discusses nonviolence it is a nonviolence in light of this reimagining. One crucial way that this plays out is Mills conflation of injurability with violence, and her
consequent loss of the subtlety that the notion of injurability carries and the troubling that it enacts.
For Jenkins, Mills misses that Butlers considerations of nonviolence occur in a specific context in response to a specific practice: the desire to use violence to staunch
the experience of injury. Nonviolence is first, for Jenkins, a willingness to undergo violation (Ibid.) which appears as the refusal to enact the compulsive necessity
of responding to injury with violence (Ibid.). To say that one is injurable is not to say that the norms of subject formation are necessarily violent, and crucially,
whatever violence norms carry with them, or whatever violences they enact or enable, the question of ethics does not emerge as a consequence of this violence but as
a consequence of our injurability. For Jenkins, a focus on injurability helps expiate the guilty life caught in a certain moralizing closed circuitry (Ibid. 160), where in
responding to our guilt of causing violence we sure up our identities as purely nonviolent individuals at the expense of an awareness of the violences we are complicit
in. It is this closed circuitry that is a consequence of the substitution that Catherine Mills characterises Butler as enacting: of a liberal ontology for a relational one,
and consequently of violence for nonviolence.
Instead, Jenkins argues that nonviolence is a practice which avows our injurability, giving testimony (Ibid. 161) to the way that violence so often is an attempt to
shore up sovereignty and in this act legitimise its continued application. Nonviolence is thus not just a critique of violence, or something to replace violence, but is a
way to force violence to testify to its converse truth (Ibid.): that it so often acts in the service of the sovereign subject attempting to be responsible but at the same
time eradicating any presence of our vulnerability. Nonviolence bears witness to the violent failure of sovereign forms of responsibility, and in so doing makes
vulnerability appear as the perverse testimony of violence (Ibid. 168). Nonviolence becomes a practice principally concerned with the disruption of what we
understand as violence; an opening up of the concept so that its genealogy may be exposed, its tacit limit cases may be made explicit, and its proper deployment
deployed in entirely improper ways. The practice of nonviolence invents the scene within which vulnerability becomes the testimony of violence, and at the same time
vulnerability operates as testimony to the weakness and failure at the core of sovereigntys self-understanding (Ibid. 162).
It is this focus on testimony, and consequently the focus on how it is that nonviolence bears witness, that I think is important. For Jenkins the lived experience of
injury (Ibid. 165) is made invisible by violence: violence enforces a specific temporality to injury, as something which can and should be immediately shored up and
disavowed (and here, following Butler, we might think of the United States violent response to the injury of September 11th, or to the Israeli States violent response
to the presence of Palestinians in what the Israeli State understands as Israel). Instead, Jenkins argues that Butler is seeking to open up a new temporality where our
nonviolence motivates us to stay with our injury, to refuse to close it down or to staunch it, and thus destabilise the instrumentalization of violence as a reflexively
constitutive force within a morality system of which Freud and Nietzsche are the diagnosticians (Ibid.). As Butler herself argues in her response to Mills and Jenkins,
the ethical question of nonviolence does not emerge as an abstract ethical precept for a deliberating subject. It emerges, rather, in the midst of a relation, an exchange,
in which the one who must decide on this issue is already injured (2007: 192). When Butler theorises the human as precarious she does so not as a new basis for
humanism (Butler, quoted in Honig 2010: 1) but as an insurrection of what it is to be human: precariousness is not a fact but a supposition; not a property of beings
(Jenkins 2013: 111) but a modality of being (Ibid.). As Jenkins highlights, precariousness is simply the ontological condition of being conditioned (Ibid.): it
cannot belong to anyone precisely because it can only be discerned at the moments when who I am is fundamentally undermined; when we are undone in our
experience of dispossession.
To conclude, Butlers theorising of precariousness and our attendant vulnerability operate precisely what Rancire understands as a poetics of politics: rather than
being a truth to replace falsehood Butlers social ontology redistributes the terms we have to make sense of the world and our relationship to it. To be sure we can read
Butler as simply advocating another form of hegemonic ontology, but if we do so I would argue we impoverish her project to think ethics beyond the ontology of the
sovereign individual, which is surely crucial.
References
Butler, Judith (2004), Undoing Gender, Abington: Routledge.
- (2006), Precarious Life, London: Verso.
- (2007), Reply from Judith Butler to Mills and Jenkins, differences, 18:2.
- (2010), Frames of War, London: Verso.
Honig, Bonnie (2010), Antigones Two Laws: Greek Tragedy and the Politics of Humanism,New Literary History, 41:1.
Jenkins, Fiona (2007), Toward a Nonviolent Ethics: Response to Catherine Mills, differences, 18:2.
- (2013), A Sensate Critique: Vulnerability and the Image in Judith Butlers Frames of War,SubStance, 42:3.
Mills, Catherine (2007), Normative Violence, Vulnerability, and Responsibility, differences, 18:2.
Rancire, Jacques and Panagia, David (2000), Dissenting Words: A Conversation with Jacques Rancire, Diacritics, 30:2.
- (2009), A few remarks on the method of Jacques Rancire, Parallax, 15:3.
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