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Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly and Vulnerability in

Resistance

Article  in  Space and Polity · June 2017

DOI: 10.1080/13562576.2017.1334788

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 Space and Polity

ISSN: 1356-2576 (Print) 1470-1235 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cspp20

Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly

and Vulnerability in Resistance

Mikko Joronen

To cite this article: Mikko Joronen (2017): Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly and
Vulnerability in Resistance, Space and Polity

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SPACE AND POLITY, 2017

BOOK REVIEW

Notes toward a performative theory of assembly, by Judith Butler, London, Harvard

University Press, 2015, 248 pp., ISBN 978-0-674-96755-5

Vulnerability in resistance, edited by Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia

Sabsay, Durham & London, Duke University Press, 336 pp., ISBN 978-0-822-36290-6

Against the direction set in Precarious Life (2005) and Frames of War (2010), the new books of
Judith Butler – Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015) and the collected
edition Vulnerability in Resistance (2016) edited together with Zeynep Gambetti and Leticia
Sabsay – offer a natural and expected step in theorizing the notion of precarity. By expanding
the discussion from the role precarity plays in the acts of war (and so in governing) to those it
has in the practices of resistance, the two books cover several new realms related particularly,
but not exclusively, to the performative ways assembling bodies claim rights. With certain
limits, one could see Butler’s Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly as a pacemaker
setting the stage for the collected edition with fine-tuned discussions on the manifold ways the
vulnerable claim rights and recognition through street politics, hunger strikes, gender politics
and demonstrations, just to name a few. The Vulnerability in Resistance, in turn, expands the
discussion by covering several recent events in Turkey, Greece, West Bank, France, and the US,
also affording an exchange between ideas that come from various theoretical backgrounds. In
this respect, both books expand the scope and significance of thinking about the collective
forms of dissent and the bodily claims of the vulnerable, but above all, of understanding the
nature of politics growing from the inherent precariousness of life.
Despite a few awkward moments (Butler’s way of framing Agamben’s notion of ‘bare life’ in
terms of socio-political exclusion rather than ontological condition of possibility, for instance;
See Abbott, 2012), Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly is a smooth reading that
handles contemporary uprisings with conceptual clarity that nowhere in the book feels
detached, repetitive or self-evident. It convincingly sets the stage for understanding the roles
recognition, precarity and performativity play in the vast ways assembling bodies claim
rights, while also problematizing the roles of the street and the public space, and so the
Roman idea of public square (and Greek polis) that formed the background for Hannah
Arendt’s understanding of the ‘space of appearance’. Butler’s critical but affirmative relation-
ship to Arendt’s work is mainly in balance, but in terms of space, which is one of the least
developed aspects in the book, this relationship brings forth ambivalence, particularly as
Butler’s discussion of spatialities involved in the bodily claims of the precarious could have
been more extensive and carefully build. Otherwise, it is easy to agree with the central
claims of the book, about the performative politics offering a way of acting in, from, and
against the precarity in particular. One of the strengths of the book is precisely the way in
which it raises the need to connect recognition and vulnerability to one another. Yet, one
should remember precarity does not only constitute a shared condition behind several
social movements, but also functions as a technique of government entwined to recognition
in complex ways. Accordingly, positive recognition can never alone guarantee existing
2 BOOK REVIEW

precarities are alleviated, as those recognized, under the norms of hegemonic and colonial dis-
courses for instance, can be merely guided to another ‘waiting room’ in history.
To be sure, in the Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly Butler clearly resigns
herself from the twofaced modes of recognition that simultaneously do violence to the ones
recognized. Yet, I hoped for a wider debate covering ambiguous situations, where it is precisely
recognition that has been used to govern, dominate and promote precarity, particularly as the
book does open up a well set avenue for taking critical distance from the empty talk encircling
the promises of political recognition. With this, I do not mean to emphasize the politics of
forming alliances between the precarious – of recognizing the right the others have for
livable lives radically other than our own, and thus of opposing recognitions that simul-
taneously disenfranchise others’ rights. These are all well acknowledged in the book. What I
refer to is rather the need to look at the more distorted, twisted and camouflaged ways of rec-
ognition, where recognition is bracketed with certain conditions, camouflaged with strategic
intent, used to reproduce the relations of domination, or operates as a settler colonial tech-
nique of government (e.g. Daigle, 2016; Joronen, 2017; Oliver, 2015; Povinelli, 2011). Such
modalities are not to be ignored as mere ‘misrecognitions’, as in many occasions the right
to claim rights is properly recognized, but through the framing and bracketing that use recog-
nition as a tool for producing and maintaining precarities, and thus, the prevalent forms of
political violence. Although Butler in no way supports such recognitions, it would have
been interesting to see where the requirement to ‘alleviate politically induced precarities’, if
we take it as a precondition for any critical talk on recognition, would have led us with
regard to the contemporary uprisings, protests and collective expressions of dissent otherwise
well scrutinized in the book.
It is perhaps a coincident that the Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly ends up
by pondering the question of moral conduct of living a good life against, and within, the vul-
nerable social conditions, particularly the biopolitical orders that make certain lives ungrieva-
ble, even close to unlivable. This is specifically so as in the first pages of the Vulnerability in
Resistance the editors set the goal of the book to ponder the corollaries of conceiving resistance
as something not merely opposing but using vulnerability as its source of action. With this
regard, the preposition ‘in’, part of the title of the collected edition, unfolds to be highly ambig-
uous, signifying not only the vulnerabilities involved in participating public gatherings, but
also the ones that feed them, further holding that no resistance can completely overcome
the vulnerability of being a living being. The chapter of Athena Athanasiou in particular
shows why and how the affirmative tones, characteristic of recent trends in analyzing political
agency, are always related, not opposed to the vulnerability.
The edited collection itself consists of 13 articles from different authors, which all, except
the more general chapters of Butler and Sabsay, draw from the particular agonisms and antag-
onisms in different political struggles of precarious, subaltern and minorities. The chapters
have surprisingly many common points of reference, such as the events in Turkey (the chap-
ters of Gambetti and Ertür on Occupy Gezi protests, Sirman’s and Ahiska’s on gender issues),
Palestinian diaspora and life under the occupation (the chapters of Tzelepis and Hammami),
gender struggles (in France, Turkey and Serbia), and resilience (the chapters of Bracke and
Hirsch). Of these, the discussion of Sarah Bracke on resilience is particularly intrusive in its
way of tracking down how the all-intriguing talk on resilience has been imposed upon subjec-
tivities. Bracke rightly argues for the need to look at the economic structures as more than
forces to adapt, but reminds us that resilience has also become a desirable part of the everyday
subject formation, particularly in popular culture. She carefully opens up several avenues
where resilience has amalgamated to a subject: in the popularized psychological theories of
‘resilient self’, security and biopolitics (e.g. the first world subject who under the threat of
 SPACE AND POLITY 3

terrorism longs for resilient security), neoliberal self-government and responsibilisation, but
also in the realm of the subaltern (i.e. Third World subjects who have survived the wars, colo-
nization, exploitation and the austerity politics of the global North). To reject the way vulner-
ability is framed in these discourses, Bracke returns to Butler’s formulation, insightfully
arguing it offers, contra talk on resilience, a route to a social transformation that appropriately
recognizes the socio-political conditions of vulnerability.
In my view, the chapter presents one of the most important essays of the volume, as it so
clearly highlights the importance of looking at vulnerability with a manner that is socially, pol-
itically and ontologically sensitive. Perhaps more focus on the relationship between what
Bracke sees central to resilience – its promise to overcome vulnerabilities – and the cruel opti-
mism of resilience, is still required, particularly as the latter never removes the underlying
social and political conditions that produced precarities in the first place. Such discussion
remains central in understanding how exactly vulnerability can operate as a source of resist-
ance, without becoming an empty promise of resilience-talk, which on the one hand embraces
the danger (and vulnerability) as an inherent condition of life, on the other promising to build
up a resilient subject capable of handling the ever given precarities of life. Though the promise
to overcome precarities may play a role in resilience, perhaps the crux is less there than it is on
the way in which resilience talk accepts vulnerability as an ontological condition without com-
prehending it as a political category entwined around the structures and relations of power.
Considering the amount of examples Butler has had on Israeli occupation in her writings on
precarity, it does not come as a surprise that Vulnerability of Resistance contains two chapters
on Palestine: one concentrating on the artwork of Mona Hatoum and the other on the Pales-
tinian activism and resistance of Israeli settler colonialism at the south Hebron Hills. The latter
chapter of Rema Hammami, in particular, brings to the fore Butler’s argument at its best.
Hammami shows how the state-induced violence, ranging from home demolitions to forced
displacements and land grapping, has eventually become the only option for the precarious
to seek protection in the cross between the vigilantism and violence of settlers and the biopo-
litical, sovereign and necropolitical tactics of the settler colonial state. Such ‘hyperprecarity’, as
Hammami calls the situation among the West Bank Palestinians, particularly the ones dwelling
in Area C, has created manifold acts of solidarity within the communities under the threat of
settler colonial eviction, theft and appropriation, but also produced counter-visibilities against
the settler colonial ways of eliminating the native. These include further solidarities, or ‘alter-
geopolitics’ as Hammami calls them by following the work of Koopman (2011), including
informal networks of relationships, international cooperation with NGO’s and several
tactics of documentation (reports, blogs, videos) not only making settler colonial violence
visible but above all enabling the continuity of everyday life in Palestinian communities.
Albeit presenting the most solid examples of the good quality of the entire volume, the
essays of Hammami and Bracke would have both benefitted from a more rigorous conclusion.
Both lay down well the relevant debates, have several telling points, but leave a sense the most
essential is lost in the course of descriptive parts. Unfortunately, such seems symptomatic for
several other essays of the book. Although the efforts, such as the one of Hirsch that mixes
personal experiences with the critique of political violence, are more than welcome, quite
often the essays rely on the power of the narrative, description, indication and eventually
the capacity of the reader to read between the lines. Several essays could have been more expli-
cit about their contribution to conceptual challenges set in the introduction part of the volume,
particularly as all the essays had the potentiality to do so. Such cannot be considered as a sign
of failure, but of the need to continue the debate over the important and topical themes widely
covered by the two books highly recommendable for anyone interested at questions related to
 4 BOOK REVIEW

social movements, performativity, body politics, precarity, and resistance of the political
violence.

Funding
This work was supported by the Suomen Akatemia [grant number 307348].

References
Abbott, M. (2012). No life is bare, the ordinary is exceptional: Giorgio Agamben and the question of political
ontology. Parrhesia, 14, 23–36.
Daigle, M. (2016). Awawanenitakik: The spatial politics of recognition and relational geographies of indigenous
self-determination. The Canadian Geographer, 60(2), 259–269.
Joronen, M. (2017). Spaces of waiting. Politics of precarious recognition in the occupied West Bank.
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. doi:10.1177/0263775817708789
Koopman, S. (2011). Alter-geopolitics: Other securities are happening. Geoforum, 42(3), 274–284.
Oliver, K. (2015). Witnessing, recognition, and response ethics. Philosophy & Rhetoric, 48(4), 473–493.
Povinelli, E. (2011). Economies of abandonment. Social belonging and endurance in late liberalism. Durham &
London: Duke University Press.

Mikko Joronen
Faculty of Management, Space and Political Agency Research Group (SPARG), University
Tampere
mikko.joronen@uta.fi
© 2017 Mikko Joronen
https://doi.org/10.1080/13562576.2017.1334788

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