JUDITH BUTLER
There are many examples of people coming together, forming a way of speaking as a collective, and demanding a change in policy or a dissolution of a government. Tahrir Square has become emblematic of this assembly of bodies on the street who first demanded the dissolution of the Mubarak regime and then continued, in different configurations, to arrive on the street en masse to object to various policies of the transitional regime, to the appointment of officials known to have engaged in torture in the previous regime, opposing the accelerated pace by which a new constitution was forged and objecting most recently to the dissolution of the court system by the president’s unilateral decree. What kind of “we” is this who assembles in the street and asserts itself sometimes by speech or action, by gesture, but more often than not by coming together as a group of bodies in public space, visible, audible, tangible, exposed, persistent, and interdependent. Although we often think that the speech act by which “we, the people” consolidates its popular sovereignty is one that issues from such an assembly, it is perhaps more appropriate to say that the assembly is already speaking and is already an enactment of popular sovereignty. The “we” voiced in language is already enacted by the assembly of bodies, their gestures and movements, their vocalizations, and their ways of acting in concert, to cite Hannah Arendt.
1The right to exercise the freedom of assembly, sometimes understood as the freedom of association, is by now well documented in international law.
2 The International Labour Organization makes explicit that the right of assembly (or association) is tied to the rights of collective bargaining.
3 In some human rights discourses, the freedom of assembly is described as a fundamental form of freedom that deserves protection by any government without interference (the use of police and judicial powers to enact indefinite detention or arrest, harassment, assault, or disappearances). Freedom of assembly does not depend upon that protection in those cases when the protective power of the state is contested by such an assembly or when a specific state has contravened the right of assembly such that its population can no longer freely congregate without threat of state interference. So the freedom of assembly is something other than a specific right protected by existing national or international law, including human rights law. Indeed, the freedom of assembly may well be a precondition of politics itself.
How, then, do we think about the freedom of assembly and popular sovereignty? Although elected officials are supposed to represent popular sovereignty (or the “popular will” more specifically) by virtue of having been elected by a majority of the population, it does not follow that popular sovereignty is in any way exhausted by the electoral process or that elections fully transfer sovereignty from the populace to its elected representatives. The populace remains separate from those elected and can continue to contest the conditions and results of elections, as well as the actions of elected officials. So “popular sovereignty” certainly translates into elected power on the occasion of a vote, but that is never a full translation. Something remains untranslatable about popular sovereignty since it can surely bring down regimes as well as elect them. As much as popular sovereignty legitimates parliamentary forms of power, it also retains the power to delegitimate those same forms. If parliamentary forms of power require popular sovereignty, they also surely fear it, for there is something about popular sovereignty that runs counter to, and exceeds, every parliamentary form that it institutes. Even an elected regime can be brought to a halt or overcome by that assembly of people who speak “in the name of the people,” enacting the very “we” that holds final legitimating power under conditions of democratic rule. In other words, the conditions of democratic rule depend finally upon an exercise of popular sovereignty that is never fully contained by any particular democratic order. Popular sovereignty might be understood as an extra-parliamentary power without which no parliament can function, and which threatens every parliament with dysfunction or even dissolution. We can call it an “anarchist” energy or a permanent principle of revolution within democratic orders. In either case, it depends upon a set of bodies assembled and assembling, whose actions effectively constitute themselves as “the people.”
Of course, it is never really the case that all of the possible people who are represented by “the people” show up to claim that they are the people! So “we, the people” always has its constitutive outside, as we know. It is thus surely not the fact that the “we” fairly and fully represents all the people; it cannot, even though it can strive for more inclusive aims. Indeed, those who assemble as the “we” who are “the people” are not representing the people but providing the legitimating ground for those who do come to represent the people through elections. The people who are the “we” do something other than represent themselves; they constitute themselves as the people, and this act of self-making or self-constitution is not the same as any form of representation. Something nonrepresentative and nearly tautological thus becomes the basis of democratic forms of government—popular sovereignty is thus a way of forming a people through an act of self-designation. This act of self-designating and self-constituting forms an assembly that articulates itself as the “people.” Popular sovereignty is thus a form of reflexive self-making that is separate from the very representative regime it legitimates. It cannot do this work of legitimation unless it is independent of any particular regime.
In what sense is popular sovereignty a performative exercise?
It would seem, then, that “we, the people” is first and foremost a speech act that is self-designating and self-constituting. Someone says “we” along with someone else, or some group says it together, and when they say it, they seek to constitute themselves as “the people” at that moment. So, considered as a speech act, “we, the people” is an enunciation that seeks to bring about the social plurality it names. It does not describe that plurality but seeks to bring about the social plurality that speaks it. It would seem, then, that a linguistic form of autogenesis is at work in the expression “we, the people”; it seems to be a rather magical act, or at least one that compels us to believe in the magical nature of the performative.
4 Of course, “we, the people” starts a longer declaration of wants and desires, or intended acts, and political claims. It is a preamble, so it prepares the way for a specific set of assertions. It is a phrase that gets us ready for a substantive political claim, and yet, in this volume, we are asked to pause at this way of starting up the sentence and ask whether a political claim is already being made, or is in the making. It is perhaps impossible for all the people who might say “we, the people” at the same time to speak that phrase in unison. And if somehow an assembled group were to yell out “we, the people,” as sometimes happens in the assemblies of the Occupy movement, it is a brief and transitory moment, one in which a single person speaks at the same time that others speak, and some unintended plural sounding results from that concerted plural action, that speech act spoken in common.
But let us admit that such a moment of literally speaking in unison, and naming ourselves as “the people,” rarely happens quite like that—simultaneous and plural. After all, the declaration of “we, the people” in the United States is a citation, and the phrase is never fully freed of its citationality. The Constitution begins with such a phrase, one that authorizes the writers to speak for the people more generally. It is a phrase that establishes political authority at the same time that it declares a form of popular sovereignty bound by no one political authority. Popular sovereignty can give itself (in assent) and withdraw itself (in dissent or in revolution), which means that every regime is dependent upon popular sovereignty being given if it hopes to base its legitimacy on something other than coercion.
The speech act, however punctual, is nevertheless inserted in a citational chain, and that means that the temporal conditions for making the speech act precede and exceed the momentary occasion of its enunciation. And for yet another reason, the speech act, however illocutionary, is not fully tethered to the moment of its enunciation: the plurality designated and produced by the utterance cannot all assemble in the same place to speak at the same time, so it is both a spatially and temporally extended phenomenon. When and where popular sovereignty—the self-legislative power of the people—is “declared,” or rather “declares itself,” it is not exactly at an instant but instead through a series of speech acts or performative enactments. We can postulate the scene of a public assembly in which everyone speaks in one voice, but this scene is both abstract and somewhat frightening—invoking a kind of Gleichschaltung that suggests a fascist march or militaristic chant of some kind. “We, the people” does not presuppose or make a unity but founds or institutes a set of debates about who the people are and what they want.
I take it that we do not really want every person speaking in the exact same way when popular sovereignty is being asserted, or even “saying” the same words. (Which language would be used for such an idea of concerted plural expression? And what form of hegemony would that install?) And yet, “we, the people” is a phrase that we take to be emblematic of a form of popular sovereignty that assumes that the people can and do act together to name themselves and so to collect themselves in a plural political form. This does not mean that they agree with one another but only that they understand that the process of self-making is a collective or shared one. When someone tries to mobilize “we, the people,” we look over to see who says it, whether they have a right to say it, but whether, in saying it, their speech act will be effective, gathering forth the people in the very saying. The phrase does not tell us who the people are, but it marks the form of self-constitution in which that debate over who they are and should be begins to take place.
So if we were following J. L. Austin, “we, the people” would be considered an illocutionary speech act that constitutes its object (itself) at the moment of its enunciation.
5 And yet, as citational, I would suggest that is actually constituted time and again, and always only partially, through a sequence or a cluster of performative enactments that turn out not always to be a simultaneous and plural form of self-designation. As we perhaps can see, “we, the people” is a phrase, then, that conducts an implicit critique of the magical powers of the enunciatory act, the illocutionary performative. It is rarely spoken as such, and yet it speaks through other acts. And if we imagine that a group must first assemble in a particular place, a public square or some equivalent, in order to proclaim “we, the people,” then
we fail to recognize that the act of assembling and reassembling is already doing the work of the phrase; in other words, assembling is already a performative political enactment even if it is prior to, and apart from, any particular speech act. Implied by such a notion is that bodies assembled together to assert their plural existence are already engaged in self-designation and the exercise of popular sovereignty, lending or withdrawing their support, declaring their independence from the regimes that depend upon it for legitimacy. The performative is thus outside of electoral power at the same time that it functions as its legitimation. Enacted by bodies arriving in a space and time together, or through circuitries that connect diverse spaces and times, political performatives do not have to be spoken in unison, or even in the same language, to be constituting themselves as “a people.” And when they assemble, or scatter and then reassemble, the performative is no longer a punctual “act” or discrete occasion of enunciation (although it can sometimes surely take that form). So, then, we are left with this question:
does the speech act by which “
we, the people”
is declared finally not take place in speech, and prove to be something other than a single act?I propose to think about the assembly of bodies as a performative enactment and so to suggest not only that (a) popular sovereignty is a performative exercise, but (b) it necessarily involves a performative enactment of bodies. First, I propose that we have to understand the idea of popular sovereignty that “we, the people” seeks to secure. In the Declaration of Independence, as Derrida has shown, there is already a kind of stumbling that takes place.
6 If the “we” who hold these truths to be self-evident are the people, then we are already in a bit of a bind. A performative declaration seeks to bring about those truths, but if they are “self-evident” then they are precisely the kinds of truths that do not need to be brought about at all. Either they are performatively induced or they are self-evident, but to bring about that which is self-evident seems paradoxical. We could say that a set of truths is being brought into being, or we could say that we found those truths somewhere and that we did not bring them into being. Or we can say that the kind of truths at issue here have to be declared as self-evident for that self-evidence to be known. In other words, they have to be made evident, which means that they are not self-evident. This circularity seems to risk contradiction or tautology, but perhaps the truths only become evident in the manner in which they are declared. In other words, the performative enactment of the truth is the way of making evident that very truth, since the truth in question is not pre-given or static but enacted or exercised through a particular kind of plural action. If it is the very capacity for plural action that is at stake in claiming popular sovereignty, then there is no way to “show” this truth outside of the plural and invariably conflictual enactment we call self-constitution.
If the plural subject is constituted in the course of its performative action, then it is not already constituted, which means that whatever form it has prior to its performative exercise is not the same as the form it takes as it acts, and after it has acted. The “we” effects a certain gathering. At the same time, it is only when bodies gather in some particular configuration of space and time that the “we” comes into being, even if it is not explicitly spoken. So how do we then understand this movement of gathering, which is durational and implies occasional, periodic, or definitive forms of scattering? It is not one act, but a convergence of actions different from one another, a form of political sociality irreducible to conformity. Even when a crowd speaks together, they have to gather in close enough proximity to hear another’s voice, to pace one’s own vocalization, to achieve rhythm and harmony to a sufficient degree, and so to establish a relation both auditory and corporeal with those with whom some signifying action or speech act is undertaken. We start to speak
now and stop
now. We start to move
now, or more or less at a given time, but certainly not as a single organism. We try to stop all at once, but some keep moving, and others move and rest at their own pace. Temporal seriality and coordination, bodily proximity, auditory range, coordinated vocalization—all of these constitute essential dimensions of assembly and demonstration. And they are all presupposed by the speech act that enunciates “we, the people”; they are the complex elements of the
occasion of its enunciation.
The body has always been part of that occasion. Let us recall that the illocutionary act is characterized as one that brings about effects on the occasion of its enunciation. This does not mean that enunciation is its own occasion, since any enunciation presupposes a specific convergence of spatial, temporal, and sensible fields. Indeed, the occasion in which “we, the people” is enunciated presupposes an embodied and plural political sociality. Even when we thought, if we ever did, that the speech act was
purely linguistic, it depended upon a model of vocalization that required the throat and mouth, breathing, a bodily organism comported in a given way, a circumscribed auditory field, a zone of proximity such that bodies close enough to hear or see or sense in some other way what each was doing and saying in order to try to do and say something together; speech is itself a movement, and “movement” carried two basic senses: bodily mobility and political organization.
Is there, then, any speech act that brings forth “we, the people” that is not a bodily and political movement of some kind? Does that speech act always presuppose, gather, and enact a body politic? On the one hand, if we take vocalization as the model of the speech act, then the body is surely presupposed as the organ of speech, both the organic condition and vehicle of speech. The body is not transmuted into pure thought as it speaks, but signifies the organic conditions for verbalization. So if speech is conceptualized restrictively as a vocalized speech act, there is no speech without the organ of speech, which means that there is surely no speech act without the organic. But what does the organic dimension of speech do to the claims made in speech, and on behalf of speech? If one assumes that speech reflects consciousness and, in particular, the “intention” of the speaker, then intention is figured as a cognitive moment represented by speech; in turn, speech is understood as corresponding to this prior cognitive content. Shoshana Felman has made this clear in the
Le scandale du corps parlant that precisely because speech is impossible without the organic, even the speech act that seeks to convey a purely cognitive intention cannot circumvent the organic body.
7 The most purely ideal intention manifest in speech is impossible without its organic condition.
So just as there is no purely linguistic speech act separated from bodily acts, there is no purely conceptual moment of thought that does away with its own organic condition. And this tells us something about what it means to say “we, the people” since whether it is written in a text or uttered on the street, it designates an assembly in the act of designating and forming itself. It acts on itself as it acts, and a corporeal condition of plurality is indexed whether or not it appears on the occasion of the utterance. That bodily condition, plural and dynamic, is a constitutive dimension of that occasion.
And we can add the following: the “organic” is no more pure than the conceptual intention it seeks to convey, since it is always organized in some way, belonging not to this or that discrete substance but to a cluster of relations, gestures, and movements that constitute its social sense. So, then, what other kinds of bodily actions and inactions, gestures, movements, and modes of coordination and organization can condition and constitute the speech act, no longer understood restrictively as vocalization? Sounds are but one way to signify in common—singing, chanting, declaring, beating drums or pots, or pounding against a prison or separation wall. How do all these kinds of acts “speak” in ways that index another sense of the organic and the political, one that might be understood as the per-formative enactment of assembly itself?
* * *
The performative enactment of “we, the people” happens prior to any vocalization of that particular phrase. The phrase is embodied before it is spoken, and even when it is spoken, it remains embodied. The phrase cannot be thought apart from its embodiment. And though “we, the people” is that act, or series of acts, by which an assembly of some kind designates and forms itself in space and time, it is also prior to any specific demand for justice or equality. So demands emerge only after an assembly designates itself as a people, and that self-formation is prior to any particular claim made in the name of the people. “We, the people” is a performative enactment without demands, though it surely gives rise to demands that depend fundamentally upon that embodied and per-formative institution of the people in its plurality.
8The embodied character of the people proves quite important to the kinds of demands that are made. When, for instance, wealth is accumulated among 2 percent of the population and increasing numbers of people lose their homes and employment, then the people are clearly divided along class lines and economic power is distributed in radically unequal ways. When those who face accelerating prospects of precarity take to the streets and begin their claim with “we, the people,” then they are asserting that they, those who appear and speak there, are identified as “the people.” They are working against oblivion. The phrase does not imply that those who profit are not “the people,” and it does not necessarily imply a simple sense of inclusion: “we are the people, too.” Rather, it asserts a form of equality in the face of increasing inequality, and it does this not simply by uttering that phrase but by embodying equality to whatever extent that proves possible, constituting an assembly of the people on the grounds of equality. One might say they are asserting inequality in the midst of inequality, and this is vain and useless, since their act is only symbolic, and true economic equality continues to become more elusive for those whose debts are astronomical and employment prospects foreclosed. And yet it seems that the embodiment of equality in the practices of assembly, the insistence on interdependency, the commonly held ground, all start to put into the world a version of equality that is rapidly vanishing in other quarters. The point is not to regard the body merely as an instrument for making a political claim but to let this body, the plurality of bodies, become the precondition of all further political claims.
Indeed, in the politics of the street that has been with us in the last years, in the Occupy movement, Tahrir Square, Puerta del Sol, the basic requirements of the body are at the center of political mobilizations—
those requirements are, in fact, publicly enacted prior to any set of political demands. And we could certainly make a list of those demands: bodies require food and shelter, protection from injury and violence, the freedom to move, to work, to have access to health care; bodies require other bodies for support and for survival. It matters, of course, what age those bodies are, and whether they are able-bodied, since in all forms of dependency, bodies require not just one other person but social systems of support that are complexly human and technical.
In a world in which the bodily life of increasing numbers of people is proving to be highly precarious, bodies emerge together on the pavement or the dirt or along the wall that separates them from their land—this assembly, which can include virtual participants, still assumes a set of interlocking locations for a plural set of bodies. And in this way, the bodies belong to the pavement, the ground, the architecture, and the technology by which they live. Thus we cannot speak about bodies without the environments, the machines, and the complex systems of social interdependency that are their conditions of support; no body survives, much less flourishes, without conditions of support. This fact, the condition of life, is enacted, shown; it emerges from the oblivion to which it is increasingly relegated. And though it seems to imply several political claims, the making of the plural body in plain view, and in defiance of those forms of police and economic power that would sequester it again, lays down the basic conditions for further political claims. If we were to come to enumerate all the requirements of the body, would we struggle only for those requirements to be met? Or do we struggle as well for bodies to thrive and for lives to become livable?
Perhaps it is possible to distinguish between a condition of politics and its various demands. Arendt famously remarks that there must be a “space of appearance” for the actor for politics to come into being.
9 But what she did not imagine is that it might be a space of appearance for the abiding requirements of the body itself. The body that appears is not only comported toward speech but to showing what is required in order to survive, to work, and to live. In the recent public assemblies of those who call themselves “the people,” attention is brought to bear on the basic needs of bodily survival, for survival is surely a precondition for all the other claims we make. Survival is a precondition of politics, but not its aim. We survive precisely in order to live, and life, as much as it requires survival, must be
more than survival in order to be livable.
10 So a demand that follows from this basic condition is precisely for a livable life—not so much equally livable (where equality and livability are reconciled). How, then, do we think about a livable life without positing a single or uniform ideal for that life? It is not a matter, in my view, of finding out what the human really is, or should be, since it has surely been made plain that humans are animals, too, and that their very bodily existence depends upon systems of support that are both human and nonhuman. So to a certain extent, I follow my colleague Donna Haraway in thinking about the complex relationalities that constitute bodily life and suggest that we surely do not need any more ideal forms of the human but rather more complex ways of understanding that set of corporeal relations and interdependencies without which we do not exist at all.
11The body is not only a discrete entity with fixed boundaries; it is also a set of relations to food, shelter, sexuality, appearance, mobility, audibility, and visuality. One that is embedded in, or disembedded from, a set of social relations and institutional forms that determine in part whether a bodily life will persist. One body does not really exist without another, and the “dyad” implied by the framework of self and Other cannot do justice to the plurality of bodies that constitute the people. How, finally, do we understand this embodied people, whose vulnerability and agency are conditioned by their environment, technology, sociality, and access to power?
Although there are those who will say that active bodies assembled on the street constitute a powerful and surging multitude, one that in itself constitutes a radical democratic event or action, I can only partially agree with that view. When the people break off from established power, they enact the popular will, though to know that for certain, we would have to know who is breaking off, and where, and who does not break off, and where are they. There are, after all, all sorts of surging multitudes I would not want to endorse (even if I do not dispute their right to assemble), and they would include racist or fascist congregations and violent forms of anti-parliamentary mass movements. I am less concerned with the vitality of surging multitudes or any nascent and promising life-force that seems to belong to their collective action than with joining a struggle to establish more sustaining conditions of livability in the face of increasing precarity. The final aim of politics is not simply to surge forth together (though this can be an essential moment of affective intensity within a broader struggle against precarity), constituting a new sense of the “people” even if sometimes, for the purposes of radical democratic change—which I do endorse—it is important to surge forth in ways that claim and alter the attention of the world for some more enduring possibility of livable life for all.
After all, something has to hold such a group together, some demand, some felt sense of injustice and unlivability, some shared intimation of the possibility of change, and that change has to be fueled by a resistance to, minimally, existing and expanding inequalities, ever-increasing conditions of precarity for many populations, both locally and globally, forms of authoritarian and securitarian control that seek to suppress democratic processes and mass movements. On the one hand, there are bodies that assemble on the street or online or through other less visible networks of solidarity, especially in prisons, whose political claims are made through forms of solidarity that may or may not appear directly in public space; on the other hand, there are mobilizations that emerge in public that make their claims through language, action, gesture, and movement, through linking arms, through refusing to move, to forming bodily modes of obstruction to police and state authorities. A given movement can move in and out of the space of heightened exposure, depending upon its strategies and the military and police threats it must face. In each of these cases, however, we can say that these bodies form networks of resistance together, remembering that bodies are not just active agents of resistance but also fundamentally in need of support. Equally, they are not just in need of support but also capable of resistance. To think politics in this sense is to think through this plural predicament of requiring and demanding support for bodily vulnerability and this mobilization of bodies in the plural in the practices of resistance.
When such movements work, they themselves provide provisional support to facilitate the broader demand for forms of enduring support that make lives livable. The demand is at once enacted and made, exemplified and communicated. Bodies assemble precisely to show that they are bodies, and to let it be known politically what it means to persist as a body in this world, and what requirements must be met for bodies to survive, and what conditions make a bodily life, which is the only life we have, finally livable.
It is not, then, exclusively or primarily as subjects bearing abstract rights that we take to the streets. If we bear those rights to freedom of assembly, to constitute ourselves as a people, then we enact them in our bodily practices. They may well be stated, but the “statement” is already in the assembly, signified by plural bodies coming together, before anyone has to speak. We take to the streets because we need to walk or move there; we need streets to be structured so that, whether or not we are in a chair, we can move there, and we can pass through that space without obstruction, harassment, administrative detention, or fear of injury or death. If we are on the streets, it is because we are bodies that require infrastructural support for our continuing existence, and for living a life that matters. Mobility is itself a right of the body, to be sure, but also a precondition for the exercise of other rights, including the right of assembly itself. Assembly is at once the condition of any possible claim at the same time that it is a specific right to which an assembly lays claim. That circularity is less a contradiction than a founding condition of a political plurality, a people.
If the body were by definition active—always self-constituting, never constituted—then we would not need to struggle for the conditions that allow the body its free activity in the name of social and economic justice. That struggle presumes that bodies are constrained and constrainable. The condition of bodily vulnerability is brought out into the open in those public assemblies and coalitions that seek to counter accelerating precarity. So it becomes all the more imperative to understand the relation between vulnerability and those forms of activity that mark our survival, our flourishing, and our political resistance. Indeed, even in the moment of actively appearing on the street, we are exposed, vulnerable to injury of one kind or another. This is especially true for those who appear on the street without permits, who are opposing the police or the military or other security forces without weapons, who are transgendered in transphobic environments, who are without documents in countries that criminalize those who seek rights of citizenship. Although one may be shorn of protection, to be sure, one is not reduced to some sort of “bare life.” On the contrary, to be shorn of protection is a form of political exposure, at once concretely vulnerable, even breakable, and potentially and actively defiant, even revolutionary. The bodies that assemble designate and form themselves together as “we, the people,” targeting those forms of abstraction that would cast bodily requirements once again into oblivion. To show up is both to be exposed and to be defiant, meaning precisely that we are crafted precisely in that disjuncture, and that in crafting ourselves, we expose the bodies for which we make our demand. We do this for and with one another, without any necessary presumption of harmony or love. As a way of making a new body politic.