Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

Judith Butler. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015. 248 pp.

Review by Hana Worthen

8 February 2016

Elaborating Hannah Arendt’s notion of the political, rethinking its investment in the public to the detriment of the private and the consequent privileging of a political subject constituted by speech, Judith Butler’s Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly turns to the corporeal materiality of resistant subjectivity, of the body, and of assembled bodies. Under the conditions of neoliberal rationality, how do embodiments of plural, popular will come into being? How do they manifest themselves in transient, concerted actions, taking forms of solidarity in unforeseeable, “uneasy and unpredictable alliances in the struggle for social, political, and economic justice” (p. 70)? As Butler argues, in their nonconsensual plurality yet shared sociality, assembled bodies gesture to “the right to have rights,” the right to the persistence of their materiality. Their “legitimacy,” she writes, must be wrested “from an existing state apparatus that depends upon the regulation of the public space of appearance for its theatrical self-constitution” (p. 85). Bodies act politically as an ensemble, and not only when they speak.

The political performativity of assemblies implies both a critical address and a resistant capacity to the differential exposure of bodies these enactments accommodate and express. As bodies—a “living set of relations” (p. 65)—assemble, they evince a relational and equitable plurality. The unfolding of how these embodiments hold together, so to speak, allows Butler to consider them as instances within which a global ethics articulates itself and on which “the need we have for one another” can be mapped (p. 218). This conditional and actualized, lived “interdependency” defines the ethical, social, and ecological domain of a politics of performativity.

Butler’s Notes not only signifies from the intersection of feminist political phenomenology with a theory of resistance but also fashions a radical democracy emphatically “bound up with a living practice of critique,” a sense of politics “implicated in other living processes of which I am but one” (pp. 200, 199). Drawing from and revising Emmanuel Levinas’s “betrayed” ethics of responsibility (p. 107), Butler refuses the familiar rhetorical we, which asserts a commonality of interest while veiling a differential access to equality, and instead invests in an interdependent “we” in order to move us from the “insufficiency of identitarian ontologies” toward a queer dependency, toward the sense that “I am already an assembly” (p. 68).

There is, though, an unhappy disavowal at work by which this readerly performative, this interdependent “we,” aims to establish its force. In Butler’s vision, the assembly is constituted by a “new ‘between’ of bodies,” a sociality “never reducible to one’s own perspective,” always already exceeding the unconnected and unencumbered individual. In its relational materiality and spatial appearance, the assembly seizes upon “an already established space permeated by existing power,” a “theater . . . unproblematically housed in public space” (p. 85). “Theater” appears in the Notes as shorthand for the organizing power of the state apparatus, somehow obliquely performing, too, as an antithesis to the assembly “not circumscribed in advance” by design or identity (p. 66). By implication, Butler’s “theatrical” seems to separate theater from the power of the “unchosen dimension” of assembled plurality, I assume because theater’s “brokered” character might appear to be consistent with the “deliberate agreements we enter knowingly,” in accord with the contractual dimension of liberal state power relations (p. 152). Through Butler’s Notes, then, theater comes into sight implicitly reduced to a single scene, an inherently disavowed space incapable of the queering work of other assemblies, even the assembly of Butler’s readers, “we.”

Yet, theater embodies a diverse system of practices, a variety of ways performers—actors and spectators—assemble, reassemble, and resignify its social spaces as they lay claim to the political. Theater may provide the very site for shaping resistant assembly, as it did during the Communist regime and at the outset of the 1989 Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. On other occasions, the 2011 Tahrir Square occupation, for instance, a gathered assembly might be understood to impart a theatrical dimension to regulated social space, lending the uprising a performative clarity as action. Some contemporary assemblies formed through theatrical performance respond to the urgencies of precarity, while articulating the theater as a site and practice of precarious relations: the Belarus Free Theatre’s Trash Cuisine or the Smeds Ensemble’s Vyšniu sodas—Der Kirschgarten immediately come to mind. Such assemblies might be read back into these provocative and remarkable Notes, recovering the auxiliary senses of the theatrical, which, sometimes at least, enact the principle Butler’s assemblies seek to realize, the interdependent equality of livable life.