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The political affects of plural performativity

AA: Returning, then, to the idea of plural performativity (as performativity of plurality and performativity in plurality), let us try to unravel its political eventness, in the context of recent movements and aggregations in public spaces. What might the agonistic intercorporeality and conviviality of the crowds assembling in the cities, day and night, and protesting against their governments’ abuses of power mean for the enactment and the eventuality of the political? How does this alternative economy of bodies offer space for effectual critique of the disembodied and affectively purified subject of conventional liberal democracy? How does this alternative economy of bodies offer space for objecting to neoliberal regimes of economization of life?

As crisis becomes ordinary, one of the questions that we might need to puzzle over here is this: How do we become “moved” by, through, toward, as well as away from, dispossession in our modes of surviving global capitalism and its debt cycles? What does this social passion qua collective movement (e-motion) owe to the ec-static character of subjectivity – to our being beside ourselves and moving beyond the powers by which we are enabled? In the current instances of assembling intensity, revolt emerges as a reconfiguration of the normative operations of power that regulate the limits of the desirable, the sensible, and the intelligible. Affect, in this context, signifies affecting and being affected by the corporeal dynamic of relatedness, mutual vulnerability, and endurance. It involves being beside oneself: taken out, given over, moved, and moving. Consider, for example, the “Friday of anger” protests in Cairo and the “movement of the Outraged” in the European South. In holding up the square as a node of agonistic sociability, those bodies in stasis and in motion created space not as a static physical location but rather as a contingent field of flows and forces, extension and intension. The public expression of outrage in European cities has been vehemently attacked by various elite commentators as being “immature,” non-political, and too emotional, while what is supposedly needed is a rational, technocratic management of economic rates. The political devaluing of passion – in all its assigned connotations of irrational sentimental femininity, uncivilized primitiveness, and an inarticulate working class – is premised upon the normative and normalizing reduction of the political to juridical reason. What the gatherings bring forth, however, from Tahrir to Puerta del Sol and from Syntagma Square to Zucchotti Park, is a politics that involves and mobilizes affective dispositions, such as apprehension, outrage, despair, and occasionally hope, but is not thereby sentimental.

Although the current street-politics configurations involve the body in its injuries and innovations, they do not take it for granted. Instead, they take into account – as well as account for – the multiple ways in which bodies are “beside themselves,” dispossessed, comported beyond themselves. The public gatherings enable and enact a performativity of embodied agency, in which we own our bodies and struggle for the right to claim our bodies as “ours” (as we ask, for example, that the state keep off our bodies). However, our claim does not refer merely to individual, individually owned, self-sufficient bodies, but rather to the relationality of these bodies. Taking part in the multi-layered and multi-sited gatherings involves the corporeal vulnerability of fatigue, weariness, exhaustive obligation to pay the debt to capital, the life-threatening violence of profit extraction, exposure to police repression and brutality (including massive tear-gas and chemical exposure), but also a shared affective economy of motivation, endurance, changeability, and vitalization. If the square gatherings of protest seek to open “space to breathe,” unprovoked assaults by riot police on unarmed citizens with suffocating tear-gas pose, again and again, the question of bearability and livability. In the affective economy of such aggregations, corporeal vulnerability and revolt become each other’s indeterminate condition of possibility. The body becomes a turbulent performative occasion, one that both constrains and enables action qua embodied situatedness and extension. Perhaps this multivalent interaction of bodies, in all its affective and political intensities of empathy, kindness, and alliance – but also of tension, distress, or conflict – opens ways for thinking the materiality and affectivity of embodied agency without restoring the body as a hypostatized foundation of identitarian action and agency.

Such a conceptualization of street politics, through the perspective of our disposition to affect the world around us and our disposition to be affected by it, could work as an occasion for thinking about freedom beyond the bounds of liberal individualism. Such figuration of agency requires us to question liberal ideas about freedom, and, more specifically, the idea of the disembodied, affectively purged, self-owning individual as integral to the liberal conception of the free human subject. This also entails asking: What do modern histories of dispossession and related neoliberal forms of governmentality tell us about the liberal figuration of the human subject as paradigmatically and disembodiedly human? What do they tell us about the figuration of freedom as an inalienable form of property? In short, I am left wondering whether these new configurations of political mobilization and insurrection, in their different (but also often similar) ways of being enacted in various regions of the contemporary world, instigate a shift in our habitual ways of thinking politically about freedom through the perspective of bodily materialities and temporalities.

JB: I very much like the idea of the body as “a turbulent performative occasion.” And yes, we are left with having to rethink freedom, as many other people have done. I think you and I are considering bodily freedom in its plural form, which involves an Arendtian understanding of “concerted action,” but one that must refuse the particular way she distinguished the public from the private sphere. In fact, in many of the street assemblies and square encampments, bodily needs are being organized in a common space, which is not to say that everything about private life is exposed. The tent does provide some provisional shade and retreat, to be sure. But if we ask where and how we find freedom in such instances of “square living,” then it seems at once to be a dimension of conviviality or cohabitation, resistance, and action. This does not mean that everyone acts together or in unison, but that enough actions are interweaving that a collective effect is registered. The “I” is not dissolved in such a collectivity, but its own situation is presented or “demonstrated” as linked to a patterned social condition.

AA: I think we can track this corporeal politics of “making space” and “taking place” in various forms of civil disobedience and struggles against contemporary antidemocratic configurations of power. In fact, in mobilizing “dispossession” as an enabling arena for a politics of the performative, even in uttering the term “dispossession” and thus unavoidably reciting its injurious historicity, we must turn to resistances against the ongoing conditions of occupation in Palestine, although we can hardly do them justice. We need, in such a turn, to attend to the intensities that arise every day in the villages along the path of the barrier – the barrier that works to consolidate the annexation of Palestinian land by Israeli settlements and that routinely destroys lives, homes, communities, lands, and infrastructural conditions of livelihood and sociability. In ordinary forms of resistance, or in the weekly rallies against the wall that take place at Bil’in, people insistently put their bodies on the line against settler colonialism, land confiscation, militarism, and enduring conditions of economic and political destitution. Rather than implying a transcendent euphoria of effective will or redemption, “resistance” pertains to the ordinary and extraordinary forces of endurance and survival, emerging from, and potentially dissolving, the political condition of enforced precarious living. And yet, in their ordinary and extraordinary forms of surviving, Palestinians do not merely survive occupation and apartheid (although there is nothing mere about surviving), but they also defy and trouble the colonial foreclosure of the possibility to live. “Survival,” therefore, refers not to an existential drive of mere self-preservation but rather to the collective contingencies of exercising freedom, even in structurally unfree conditions, that produce contexts of survival as merely, or barely, living.

JB: Under the conditions of occupation in Palestine, we might say that the entire population is unfree, both in the West Bank and in Gaza, as well as in the refugee camps. And we have to say it, to be sure, since the Palestinian population remain under an enduring colonial rule and subjugation. And yet the acts of freedom that emerge from within the occupation include ways of resisting Israeli army guards at the checkpoint, forms of non-compliance with regulations imposed by the Israeli state, forms of border-crossing under the radar, and education and publications, especially on the internet. So there are all sorts of moments and practices of freedom under subjugation, but this does not ameliorate the normative objection to the occupation or the confiscation of property, the expulsions that still continue, and the compromised and limited citizenship of so-called Palestinian Israelis. It is perhaps at this moment that we have to consider whether resistance is a better name for this freedom, since freedom does not emanate from a part of the soul or a dimension of one’s nature, but is articulated in its exercise. And in the case of resisting occupation, the specific form that freedom takes is resistance – or, at least, that is one dominant form. “Freedom” itself is a political term, to be sure, and when one reads the sign “Free Palestine,” one understands that it is a call to bring the colonial regime to an end and to liberate the Palestinian people from those shackles. But it matters how one sees the transition – is it an entry into liberal political economy, a nation-state status, or is it more simply a “liberation” into self-determination as a political category? Self-determination designates a process whose end is not known (and whose “unrealizability” is perhaps a way of characterizing that ongoing and open process). Surely no one from the outside can prescribe the political form that self-determining Palestinians may craft for themselves, but whatever form does take place, it will have to be legitimated by a process of self-determination. And it will only remain legitimate to the extent that that process remains ongoing. So we can call this freedom, and we can locate the absolute demand to be “emancipated” from colonial rule, but once we begin to think about the next step, that is where we are under some obligation not to conceptualize or prescribe in the name of those who will be making and living that new form together.

AA: This is a really complex matter. You force me to think the importance of promoting critical thinking about the question of the desire for freedom, especially regarding collective acts of political freedom, despite the problems inherent in processes of formulating discourses of freedom. Here lies the importance of Foucault’s notion of resistance as well as his creative understanding of the relation between freedom and power. “Rather than speaking an essential freedom,” writes Foucault, “it would be better to speak of an ‘agonism’ – of a relationship which is at the same time reciprocal incitation and struggle.”¹

It seems to me that our whole conversation has had as an underlying leitmotif the question of freedom with others as freedom from the violence inherent in the freedom of individual will. We have been concerned with the political responsibility emerging when an individualistic sovereign subject is effectively challenged and when its constituting difference challenges the prerequisites of proper subjectivity. It seems to me also that it is crucial to work toward formulating projects of concerted action and collective freedom, to enact freedom along with others, while retaining and engaging with the critical force of difference. Aren’t we still attached to the urgency and the difficulty of this political project?

Note

1 Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 221–2.