From the Image of Precarity to The Statement People Think

Speech is often found at the heart of debates concerning politics and the political, in particular the question of who and what counts as a speaking and rational being, and the passage from silent to speaking beings, from nonsense to sense. One notable attempt to address this problematic occurs with Judith Butler’s notion of precarity, and the role the silent ‘face of the other’ – a concept Butler borrows from the work of Emmanuel Levinas – plays in politics. Butler’s account has at its core a tension. There is some hope that an awareness of precarity and exposure to images of precarity will lead to political action via an ethical demand, yet at other times Butler is more ambivalent about the existence of a direct relationship between imagery and political action. This tension is a result of, on the one hand, Butler trying to find a pre-discursive moment from which political action and politics can spring and their running into the very stuff of politics: speech and thought. Butler wants to find a way to move from silence to vocalization, from the mute body to the cries of protest, but it seems that ultimately Butler must return to speech.

In exploring this tension I wish to turn to the work of Sylvian Lazarus – a French political theorist and founding member, along with Alain Badiou, of Organisation Politique a French militant organization – whose work argues that thought and speech are crucial to politics. Why Lazarus? Lazarus’ account of politics, as we will see, contains this movement from silent to speaking beings. Yet it need not invoke anything like the face of the other or the ethical demand, and does not seek to ground politics somewhere beyond reason and language, a task the notion of precarity is sometimes invoked for. Rather than deny thought to capture what is excluded from politics, Lazarus is able to place thought squarely within the framework of an egalitarian politics.

Precarity

The concept of precarity is now well and truly established in the political lexicon. The idea is that we can be united, or at least sufficiently united in our shared precarity that we will act politically, and in doing so overcome problems facing us today. On such a view, precarity is a concept that erupts into the field of social relations, forcing realignments and beckoning us to ethical and political action. However, in order for precarity to be a politically efficacious concept it must pass through the very thing it is supposed to surpass: the realm of discourse and thought.  Precarity then does not overcome signification, despite Butler’s occasional suggestions it might. From Precarious Lives (2004) to Notes towards a theory of Performative Assembly (2012), what Butler charts is a passage from the sight of suffering to phrases in dispute.

Precarity is proposed as something that can unite us beyond the failure of the self-sovereign and reasoning subject, man as an independent, rational and linguistic being. Yet its political articulation takes place in the realm of thought and words. The question that confronts us is what is the political power of Butler’s notion of precarity? Butler’s promise appears to be that precarity will get us away, in some important sense, from the universalizing rationalizing subject. Yet to effect the affect of precarity we cannot abandon such tools. I believe there is a better and simpler way to think about politics, exemplified by Lazarus’ discussion of politics.

We are all precarious, because we are all able to suffer harm and injury. That our precarity is not evenly distributed is certainly true, yet we are united in the fact that no amount of wealth or privilege will ever stop us from facing, ultimately, harm. Thus precarity offers us a new universalism where what is common is “not rationality but the ontological fact of mortality, not the capacity to reason but vulnerability to suffering.” (Honig 2010, p.1) The force of the notion of precarity stems not just from the fact that it is self-evident but from the fact that it offers a universalism not enthralled to reason.

Butler’s framework gives us a model wherein if I can see or encounter this precarity, then I will be called upon to act. In a 2017 interview she stated the problematic as such:

I am open to a world that acts on me in ways that cannot be fully predicted or controlled in advance, and something about my openness is not, strictly speaking, under my control. That opening toward the world is not something that I can exactly will away. This social character of our persistence and our possible flourishing means that we have to take collective responsibility for overcoming conditions of induced precarity (Berbec and Butler, 2017)

We are social beings, and thus have an obligation to take ‘collective responsibility’ for addressing precarity. Butler draws on Levinas to articulate her ethics here. In the Levinasian picture, the face of the other makes a moral demand upon me. There are two consequences of this notion that are crucial. Firstly, the face is not literally a face, it is more like the appearance of the other. Secondly, as Butler elaborates, there is something wordless about this demand. As she writes in Precarious Life: “The face, if we are to put words to its meaning, will be that for which no words really work; the face seems to be a kind of sound, the sound of language evacuating its sense, the sonorous substratum of vocalization that precedes and limits the delivery of any semantic sense” (Butler 2004, p.134).  This emphasis on what precedes semantic sense is important, and we will return to it in what follows. The use of Levinas here solicits an ethical demand that is prior to language. This then, is why Honnig suggests that precarity has become a term that offers us a universalism and humanism apart from reason and language. Precarity is meant to offer us not just an account of those human beings whom we exclude from the institutions of politics – those we do not listen to, even though they speak – but truly mute things, and alien things including the non-human world. Butler makes this point explicitly in Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly, writing:

some ethical claims emerge from bodily life, and perhaps all ethical claims presuppose a bodily life, understood as injurable, one that is not restrictively human. After all the life that is worth preserving and safeguarding…is connected to, and dependent upon, nonhuman life in essential ways. (Butler 2012, p.118)

I am precarious insofar as I can be harmed so the predicate of precarity expands to the conditions of my wellbeing and beyond to environmental damage and climate change, unsustainable resource extraction, as well as the animal bodies injured in the name of my sustenance; they share with me the capacity for injurability.

What does the movement from the encounter with precarity to concrete political action look like? Consider Butler’s argument in the closing pages of Precarious Life:

In the Vietnam War, it was the pictures of the children burning and dying from napalm that brought the US public to a sense of shock, outrage, remorse and grief. These were precisely pictures we were not supposed to see, and they disrupted the visual field and the entire sense of public identity that was built upon that field. The images furnished a reality, but they also showed a reality that disrupted the hegemonic field of representation itself. Despite their graphic effectivity, the images pointed somewhere else, beyond themselves, to a life and to a precariousness that they could not show. It was from that apprehension of the precariousness of those lives we destroyed that many US citizens came to develop an important and vital consensus against the war. (Butler 2004, p.150)

The images of suffering children help stir U.S citizens to agitate for the end of the Vietnam War. The gamble is that when we are presented with the face of the other, we will feel the call to ethical action. Of course, we can deny this call: the seeing of an image of suffering does not necessarily lead to political action. Butler says as much in Frames of War, writing on the Abu Ghraib photographs and suggesting that they “neither numb our sense nor determine a particular response” (Butler 2009, p.78). That it might, however, is of decisive importance for Butler. What is the path from the ethical call and the realm of images to political action in Butler? What comes after the horizon of suffering?

The Image of Precarity

There is an element of the spectacle in Butler’s account of the face. It is a spectacle that beckons us instead of paralyzing us, analogous to the way political art is meant to motivate action. In political art, the assumption is that we revolt when we see revolting things (Rancière 2010, p.135). For political art as for the face of other there is meant to be a straight path between the encounter and the concrete action. In Jacques Rancière’s polemics against political art he undermines this very assumption, arguing that there is no clear path from depictions of injustice to justice. In The Emancipated Spectator he offers an account of what literature does for workers, and it does not offer them awareness of their condition.

What literature does is not messages or representations that make workers aware of their conditions. Rather it triggers news passions, which means new forms of balance – or imbalance – between an occupation and the sensory equipment appropriate to it. The politics of literature is not the politics of writers (Rancière 2011, p.72).

Art is political because it disrupts and rearranges the order of bodies, affects and subjectivities. The point is that “[t]here is no straightforward road from the fact of looking at a spectacle to the fact of understanding the state of the world; no direct road from intellectual awareness to political action.” (Ibid, p.75)

Butler affirms this critique when she moves to outline what the politics of precarity look like, what it concretely means to respond to the ethical call of the face of the other. In Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly, Butler insists that she is interested in a non-discursive phenomenon, that the politics she is interested in cannot be reduced to politics as the question of phrases in dispute. In this argument she is carrying over the commitment from Precarious Life, the invocation of the non-discursive face of the other. She writes: “Embodied actions of various kinds signify in ways that are, strictly speaking, neither discursive nor prediscursive. In other words, forms of assembly already signify prior to, and apart from, any particular demands they make.” (Butler 2012, p.8).

Butler doesn’t hold that assembly is purely non-discursive, rather it is an element, a part of non-signification embedded in the discursive. Yet, the book opens with a question about a dispute over a word. In Butler’s framing it is the dispute over the word or phrase ‘the people’. Defining democratic politics, she writes: “the point…is not simply to extend recognition equally to all of the people, but, rather, to grasp that only by changing the relation between the recognizable and unrecognizable can (a) equality be understood and (b) ‘the people’ become open to a further elaboration” (Ibid, p.5, emphasis added).

These opening passages mark another tension in Butler’s work. On the one hand Butler wants to give an account in which the non-verbal and silent is integral and not neglected. On the other hand the most obvious examples, the clearest illuminations of the politics she thinks are good and just, are examples of phrases in dispute, words whose meaning is to be challenged, expanded upon and contested. This tension remerges when Butler explicitly brings together performativity, precarity and political action:

The question of how performativity links with precarity might be summed up in these more important questions: How does the unspeakable population speak and make its claims? What kind of disruption is this within the field of power? And how can such populations lay claim to what they require in order to persist? It is not only that we need to live in order to act, but that we have to act, and act politically, in order to secure the conditions of existence. (Ibid, p.58)

The notion of precarity, and with it the hopes of a truly universal condition outside the realm of signification and language must, in order to become efficacious, pass through the realm of words and their disputation, the very stuff of politics. Once Butler begins to articulate what the politics of precarity looks like, we are led to the dispute over who speaks and who makes claims. Unsurprisingly we have returned to politics as phrases in dispute.

People Think

In this final section I want to turn to the work of French theorist Sylvain Lazarus, who investigates what politics is. For him politics consists of two statements: 1) People Think and 2) thought is relation of the real (Lazarus 2015, p.54). Lazarus’ account highlights the entangled relation between thought and politics: it shows us why it is that for precarity to be effected it must pass through thought. It is the first statement, ‘People Think’ that concerns us here. What does this statement ‘People Think’ look like in action? In his article ‘Can Politics be Thought in Interiority’ Lazarus offers the following elaboration: “deciding as to the existence of the word – thus forbidding its disappearance, subjectivating it as what permits a transformation in consciousness as those who pronounce it – is exactly what I mean by people think” (Lazarus 2016, p.111). Before proceeding, we need to know what Lazarus means by ‘interiority’. For Lazarus there are two kinds of politics, politics in interiority and politics in exteriority. Politics in interiority happens “at a distance from the State” and politics in exteriority happens “in the space of the State.” (Ibid, p.109).

In order to understand these terms – ‘People Think’, ‘Politics in Interiority’ – it is helpful to consider an example Lazarus himself gives. This example regards a dispute about the status of workers and indeed the very term worker. Firstly, in January 1984, a series of foreign workers on strike at the Talbot-Poissy factory were dismissed by a member of Francois Mitterrand’s government as not workers but ‘immigrants’. The dispute is shifted from an industrial dispute to a cultural one. Yet the word worker did not disappear after this, rather it becomes a ‘problematic word’. Years later, when workers at the Renault-Billancourt factory were interviewed they made an explicit point of describing themselves as workers. In doing so they were engaging in a struggle over a problematic word, which is precisely what Lazarus means by his statement ‘People Think’; “The intellectuality of people’s thought arranges itself through certain words – which I call “problematic” (Lazarus 2019). In Lazarus’ above example of ‘people think’ the struggle centers on what he calls a ‘problematic word’, in this case the word ‘worker’. Thinking in interiority – thinking politically – is precisely to engage in a struggle over problematic words. (Neocosmos 2016, p.49). In this way politics always concerns itself with words and thoughts. The factory worker who, defined as an immigrant, fights instead to be seen as a worker is placing a claim about who they are and defining their roles for themselves.

For Lazarus, politics in interiority is intrinsically related to the new and the possible. He writes “no politics in interiority is tenable if it does not place itself in a new position regarding what people’s capacity is, and what I call the possible.” (Lazarus 2016, p.115). Thought is the thought of the possible, the new. If politics is defined as the statement that people think it becomes about taking a position regarding what people’s capacity is. It takes not just thought, but speech as essential for politics. People display their capacity for thought through speech.  Speech marks politics not only in challenging the terms associated with certain people – the movement from foreigner to worker – but the very shift Butler mentioned earlier, the question of how the unspeakable population speaks and makes it claims. The path from the spectacle of precarity to political action which is meant to combat precarity passes through this stage, the stage of problematic words and people’s thought. When Butler moves to offer an account of what politics precarity gives us, she returns us to what precarity is not supposed to require: discourse, words and reason.

The consequences of this return are as follows. Firstly, it means that there is no such thing as the politics of precarity apart from the politics of the possible and phrases in dispute. Butler at times adheres to such a notion of politics, but at other times wants the non-discursive to play a prior role: the silent face of the other, the image of precarity that leads us to political action. Butler’s attempts to place non-signification as crucial to this story of precarity and political action lead us back to the very things it is meant to hedge against. While Butler’s concept has a moral force that affects us, that gives us pause, it is not clear if it offers us a politics of the possible, as concerns Lazarus. Secondly, if it is – as Honig suggests – the beginnings of a new humanism detached from the follies of enlightenment reason, politics is intimately bound up with thought and some version of reason.  Finally, if our hope is that precarity will offer us a new way of relating to the non-human world – the environment that we degrade, the animals that we slaughter – it is not clear such justice will be achieved with a new lexicon and a touch of theoretical flair.

Lazarus’ approach to politics and the possible are abstract, but they are abstract because they take seriously the idea that politics is about what people think. Precarity, as a concept, is a powerful philosophical word, one that brings our attention to our status as injurable beings. The next step, however, returns us to our intellectual capacities, to thought and discourse that we must always pass through to affect change.