CS
Spring 2010
I. INTRODUCTION: THE FRAMES OF WAR
In recent writings on the “frames of war,” Judith Butler charts constellations of state violence, media, and sense experience to map the United States’s aesthetic and biopolitical management of precarious life in detention centers at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. In an essay on Abu Ghraib, Butler explicates the complexities output from the machinery of torture plugged into and fueled through photographic relays. At the same time, she stresses the subversive potential of the Abu Ghraib photographs, noting that they may, in their temporality comporting with the future anterior, install relations of grievability; by offering confirmation that “a life was,” the photographs “underscore that a life is a grievable life.”1 Accordingly, the Abu Ghraib photographs don’t merely record the events they depict; they also “anticipate” and “perform” the grievability of the tortured lives within (FW 98). In Butler’s view, the Abu Ghraib photographs stage crucial interventions in their own violent tendencies, potentially switching on an affirmative biopolitics that acknowledges the precariousness of life and so redistributes life’s grievability in more egalitarian ways.
Though Butler’s astute understanding of the biopolitics and aesthetics of grievability delivers an impassioned and cogent criticism of the US’s war on terror practices at Abu Ghraib, I caution against too readily accepting its underlying presumptions concerning the relations between precarious and grievable life. Specifically, one wonders whether grief and mourning, as angles of entry into the grievability of life, prop up an account of precarious life that folds too easily into a normative frame of sentimentalized life inimical to critique of the effects of the power relations mapped by Butler. To be fair, I don’t think Butler’s conceptualization of precarious life, inflected by notions of grievability, necessarily follows a sentimental trajectory, and Butler would likely dispute the characterization of her account below. Nonetheless, the hesitation guiding this paper appears at moments throughout Butler’s thoughts in which her focus slips between the conditions of life and the valences of a life. For example, when writing that “we can be haunted in advance by the suffering or deaths of others” through the Abu Ghraib photographs, Butler emphasizes the shaping of grievable life through the future anterior (FW 98). She further writes that “the anticipation of the past underwrites the photograph’s distinctive capacity to establish grievability as a precondition of a knowable human life – to be haunted is precisely to apprehend that life before precisely knowing it” (FW 98). In this formulation, Butler suggests that we might apprehend a loss before the life to which that loss refers; we are haunted by a loss that predates life. And yet, that loss, intelligible only through the future anterior, is voiced through and by the singularity of life: “someone will have lived.” Butler notes that loss underscores a life, but also that we may only understand loss through a life, for “if we can be haunted, then we can acknowledge that there has been a loss and hence that there has been a life” (FW 98). In other words, we can be haunted only if there has been a loss apprehended only through the life to which it refers. Hence my apprehensions concerning the sentimentalization of grievable and, by extension, Butler’s conceptual framing of precarious life.
This paper breaks with the sentimental framing of grievable life and its shift of focus from the conditions of life to accounts of a life informed by mourning or grief. Specifically, I argue that mourning and grief under Butler’s conceptualization of loss might lapse into a mode of subjectivity identifying with suffering. The consequent sentimental politics elevates true feeling as the legitimate and perhaps only conduit through which political energies and expression may travel. It forecloses sustained critique guided by a mapping of violent tendencies and trajectories while equating the affective with the political; sentimentality makes proper feeling count politically. The hazards of sentimentality function as warning signs detouring Butler’s notion of precarious life along political paths. Consequently, I wonder what happens to precarious life when unhinged from formulations framed by grievability. This paper aims to open further speculation on such a possibility.
II. GRIEVABLE LIFE AND SENTIMENTALITY
Butler’s discussion of grievable life may be seen as her engagement with biopolitics. Butler departs from both Foucault’s and Agamben’s conceptualization of biopolitics by locating the value of life in neither some regulatory ideal toward which institutions, knowledges, and practices strive, nor in the decisions of a sovereign to institute a state of exception as the spatiotemporal corollary of politically disenfranchised subjects. Although indebted to and inflected by the thoughts of Foucault and Agamben, Butler surmises that the value of life derives only from its potential loss: “Only under conditions in which the loss would matter does the value of life appear” (FW 14). This strong suggestion renders the value of life an ontological conceit rather than a historical or political imperative; although there may be shifts in the conditions of and decisions upon the differential distribution of grievability, the value of life remains ontologically determined solely by grievability. Accordingly, in Butler’s view, grievability is the backdrop informing biopolitical practices; it informs us of which populations are politically protected and cultivated and which are marked for abandonment and annihilation. Butler writes that the “shared condition of precariousness,” under biopolitically inegalitarian arrangements, commences with the “specific exploitation of targeted populations, of lives that are not quite lives, cast as ‘destructible’ and ‘ungrievable’” (FW 31). Informed by Foucault’s explication of the thanatopolitical turn in biopolitics by which society must be defended against racialized threats, Butler further notes that these “not-quite-lives” are “cast as threats to human life as we know it than as living populations in need of protection from illegitimate state violence, famine, or pandemics” (FW 31). So ungrievability functions not only as the defining condition of populations for which political protection isn’t forthcoming; it summons the elimination of the not-quite-lives it marks and “rationalize[s] their death” because “the loss of such populations is deemed necessary to protect the lives of ‘the living’” (FW 31). As Butler writes, “those whose lives are not ‘regarded’ as potentially grievable, and hence valuable, are made to bear the burden of starvation, underemployment, legal disenfranchisement, and differential exposure to violence and death” (FW 25). By intertwining the value of life with grievability, Butler renders grievability as the ontological angle of entry into and determining frame of biopolitics.
When framing grievability as the focal point of biopolitics, Butler casts grief as an important means by which we realize that our subjectivity is fundamentally social. As Butler ponders, grief functions as the inroad into biopolitical subjectivity: “Perhaps we can say that grief contains the possibility of apprehending a mode of dispossession that is fundamental to who I am.”2 In this formulation, grief functions more as an existential rather than political relation; through its effected “mode of dispossession,” it concerns what is “fundamental” to the self rather than the conditions of political life. The self, always already “implicated in lives that are not our own,” is stained with the “imprint” of the “fundamental sociality of embodied life” (PL 28). By positing that we are “from the start and by virtue of being a bodily being” (PL 28), Butler considers life to exist not in regard to some internal essence but only through its openness to and immersion in what lies outside – the exposure apprehended by and through grief. Butler’s shift of the ontological grounding of subjectivity from the self to the social is revealed in the “sphere of dispossession” opened by and in times of grief (PL 28). In other words, the loss of life that unsettles my own life unveils my fundamental dependence on lives that are not my own. Subjectivity is actually intersubjective, where “my” life consists just as much of the lives of others as my “own”. This revelation of interdependency as the ontological ground of subjectivity becomes, as explicated below, the departure point for Butler’s exploration of biopolitics within the frame of grievability.
Grief may compel recognition of the fundamental interdependency marking our ontological condition but only by operating as a personal affair. Butler articulates grief’s revelation of our interdependence as a passage from personal relations to impersonal intersubjectivity. She notes that the “unconscious imprint of my primary sociality” then becomes perceptible even when “I do not always know what it is in another person that I have lost” (PL 28, emphasis mine). In other words, whilst the particular, particularly obscure something lost along with a lost life may never be known, what does become known is the essential dependence one has on the somethings of others. In her own words, “when one loses, one is also faced with something enigmatic: something is hiding in the loss, something is lost within the recesses of loss” (PL 21-2). I suggest that in Butler’s framework, grief renders acknowledgement of interdependence as the ontological ground for subjectivity as the potential result of working through personalized loss. Without knowing what has been lost, we simply need to know and feel that a loss has occurred in order for there to be a revelation of our fundamental interdependency. The something functions as a personal detail underpinning a particular loss. Although it may not be clearly known, what is clearly known is that that something had once been there but is now lost. The mysterious, missing something becomes the placeholder for the personal, telling us that there indeed was something personal in the tie that has unraveled under the transpiration of a loss. So when I write of “the personal,” I am in part gesturing toward that indiscernible something sensed within a loss that registers it as a loss and consequently enables grief. Accordingly, the personal does not merely pertain to me in myself. It is social, but it twists sociality into something personally pertinent. “The impersonal” thus characterizes either the absence of such somethings that would tether me to another in a recognizable relation or the absence of sensing such somethings within an interpersonal relation that unravels unnoticeably. Grief, so tethered to the personal, tends to turn the event of loss into a self-directed affair, even if who I am becomes unsettled in the process when something has gone missing. The subtext here whispers that the personal allocates grievability and not just the other way around as Butler presumes in her argument (explored in the next paragraph) that grievability makes life count as a life. Worded differently: there is no loss in the impersonal. It is only by personalizing loss that grief has us acknowledge the interdependency implicit in our subjectivity and, by extension, life’s grievability.
Indeed, grievability, for Butler, is the ontological condition qualifying life as life while making it something more. She writes that “without grievability, there is no life, or, rather, there is something living that is other than life” (FW 15). This formulation offers a curious distinction between “life” and “something living” with grievability functioning as the delineating mediator. According to Butler, grievability, as indicated by a grammar of the future anterior, “is a condition of life’s emergence and sustenance” (FW 15). In other words, grievability tells us both that what lies before us will be a life and that it will be one that will have been lived; the grammatical temporality of grievability is split into bookends of a life that will be and a life that will have been. It tells us what counts not merely as life but, more specifically, as a life. It shows us what is merely living but unworthy of consideration as a life.3
But how does grievability do so? When she writes that “the apprehension of grievability precedes and makes possible the apprehension of precarious life,” Butler indicates that grievability is a thing to be apprehended (FW 15). She argues in Frames of War that grievability is situated within and framed by social norms that organize the field of perception through which lives may be apprehended as such. Her preference for “apprehension” over “recognition” (the former concerns what is sensible without yet becoming “conceptual forms of knowledge” which is the domain of the latter [FW 5]) renders grievability merely dimly discernible. In other words, the normative criteria for what counts as grievable life and what does not remain unclear even as they may be gestured toward and partially and imperfectly grasped. In Butler’s account, traces of grievability are located in and produced by various media, including the obituary and other life narratives, photographic images, and lists of the names of those murdered by military campaigns. None of these articles clearly display the predominant frame or figure of grievability but they do compose an opaque, incomplete index of grievability. They confront us with loss even as the life to which that loss occurs has yet to be known. Whether the traces of grievability lingering in media register loss depends on the magnitude of their sensorial impact; however rattled or shocked our senses are determines whether a loss counts as loss and whether such losses will be grieved. But although, in Butler’s account, the apprehension of grievability precedes the life to which a loss refers, we wonder why Butler selects media gravitating toward personal aspects of a life as the loci from which grievability may be apprehended and a sense of loss grief may ensue. While grievability is surely framed and differentially distributed through the norms governing the personal, Butler merely seeks to resignify those norms to reallocate grievability in an egalitarian manner attuned to the precariousness of life. In other words, although she does criticize the normative practices framing the personal, Butler does not contest, at least explicitly, the normative practices fronting the personal as the point of entry into grievability. For example, Butler may say that racist, misogynist, or nationalist imperatives regulate the formation of grievable life by preventing members of target populations from being considered as persons. Butler would aim to contest those imperatives to reshape the norms governing grievability in order to allow the previously excluded to now count as persons within a reconstituted humanity. What she does not explicitly challenge, however, is why grievability ought to remain apprehendable through articles of the personal. Why must the personal be the departure point for the apprehension of grievability and acknowledgment of the precariousness of life?
Butler attempts to answer this question: “Despite our differences in location and history, my guess is that it is possible to appeal to a ‘we,’ for all of us have some notion of what it is to have lost somebody. Loss has made a tenuous ‘we’ of us all” (PL 20). What makes some shared notion of “we” possible is the fact that everyone has experientially developed a concept of loss. In other words, some personalized notion of loss becomes the departure point for a more generalized notion of loss. But, as explored below, the reason for why this leap from the personal to the impersonal occurs remains unclear at best. Could Butler’s focus on the personal comport with a normative twinning of grief and the personal that, in part, forecloses the apprehension of life’s precariousness?
While admitting that her account of grievable life begins from grief that is framed by the personal, Butler’s political optimism inflates the potential for our hearts’ and minds’ migration to meditations on more generalized conditions of vulnerability. Butler hopes that the “narcissistic preoccupation of melancholia” can be reoriented toward the “consideration of the vulnerability of others” (PL 30). She then locates an opportunity for mere “consideration” to become critical evaluation and then opposition to the differential distribution of grievability and vulnerability. This is what I meant by my earlier suggestion that Butler believes that grief, turned from personal relations to interpersonal dependencies, might initiate new political communities. And yet, the leaps made by Butler – from apprehension of loss to consideration of generalized vulnerability to critique and finally to political opposition – may seem too incredible, especially since Butler does not seem to carefully consider and explicate how hurdles along grief’s political trajectory may be surmounted. The personal, I think, is one such obstacle. I agree with Butler that grief need not be a private affair, one that relegates us to a “solitary situation” that is depoliticized (PL 22). At the same time, Butler’s extraordinary optimism is suspicious:
But I think [grief] furnishes a sense of political community of a complex order, and it does this first of all by bringing to the fore the relational ties that have implications for theorizing fundamental dependency and ethical responsibility. If my fate is not originally or finally separable from yours, then the “we”is traversed by a relationality that we cannot easily argue against; or, rather, we can argue against it, but we would be denying something fundamental about the social conditions of our very formation. (PL 22-3)
I remain curious as to the extent grief flows beyond its solitary situation and attains the reach proposed by Butler. When Butler speaks of the relational ties that bear on conceptualizations of ethical responsibility within intersubjective frames, she holds high hopes for immersion in the purely personal to become reflection on the radically impersonal. I believe in the potential for this to happen but question why thought would outwardly move from personal grief, invested in these relational ties, to critical reflection on social ontologies concerning relational ties of dependence in general. After all, if grief and grievability really rely on the personal, that particular something that I have lost with loss, how would I begin to think beyond the relations in which that something had thrived? In other words, why might the unsettlement initiated by a registered, more or less personal loss, in which I cannot quite place my finger on that opaque something that had bound me to another, lead me into philosophical contemplation of our existential togetherness, in which there may be no somethings binding us together or no sensible somethings that would allow loss to count as loss, and not merely the togetherness of my particular relation of the lost one? After all, Butler’s hope for grief is that it will mark and spark “an insurrection at the level of ontology” with the corollary provocation of big questions, like “What is real? Whose lives are real? How might reality be remade?… What, then, is the relation between violence and those lives considered as ‘unreal’? Does violence effect that unreality? Does violence take place on the condition of that unreality?” (PL 33). Again, I do not deny that such questions may potentially preoccupy us on visceral and cognitive registers to various degrees in the aftermath of loss; rather, I simply believe that such questions arise not from loss itself but loss in relation to conditions outside itself. My skepticism of Butler’s account lies in the normative framing of loss itself when it is registered: what codes loss as a matter provoking ethical reflection rather than “narcissistic preoccupation”? Might grief, framed by notions of the personal (evident in the details and articles itemized by Butler), restrict loss to the latter? If so, is grief not one vector of power directed by the state in its efforts to manage the differential distribution of vulnerability? Butler answers this last question in the affirmative, noting that “the prohibition on certain forms of public grieving itself constitutes the public sphere on the basis of such a prohibition” thereby fomenting a militarist nationalism and stifling dissident dispositions (PL 37). But while she critically identifies some media by which the personal frames grief, she does not sufficiently arm us with a robust critique of the personal that would maintain grief as a political resource. When discussing the Abu Ghraib photographs, for example, Butler compellingly asserts that uncovering names and faces of hooded prisoners – a practice of the personal – risks repeating acts of torture and that one ethical reaction would be to acknowledge that “the face and name are not ours to know, and affirming this cognitive limit is a way of affirming the humanity that has escaped the visual control of the photograph” (FW 95). I am unsure how to reconcile this ethical responsiveness with a politics of grief wrapped in the restricting frame of the personal. How is the sense of loss provoked by the photograph translated into grief if such loss ought not be personalized? Recall that loss is registered through a missing something – the personal. Subtract the personal, and you subtract the potential for grief in its presently intelligible manifestations. Perhaps Butler would argue that grief needs to be unhinged from the personal but she neither does so nor hints how this might be done. She simply signposts steps into an egalitarian apprehension of precarious life without giving us a roadmap that details detours around the barriers explicated above.
Perhaps part of the problem with Butler’s framework for precarious life, in its imbrications with grievable life, lies in her optimism that grief allows us to grasp something fundamental about life – namely, a “common human vulnerability” that, if heeded and responded to, functions as the spring for ethical and political injunctions to “protect others from the kinds of violence we have suffered” (PL 30). Noting the limits of ethical and political responsiveness by Butler’s personalization and humanization of varieties of violence suffered by an anonymous “we,” we readers are told by Butler that grief, instrumentalized as “a resource for politics,” fuels “the slow process by which we develop a point of identification with suffering itself” (PL 30, emphasis mine). It would appear that the “slow process” of grief consists of passing through historical and political formations to access something like an ontological condition. Butler would protest this observation by pointing out that her notion of a “new bodily ontology” – a constellation of “precariousness, vulnerability, injurability, interdependency, exposure” and the like – refers not to “a description of fundamental structures of being that are distinct from any and all social and political organization” (FW 2). She suggests that because bodily being always already belongs to and can never be thought apart from social and political milieu formed historically, the ontology of the body is a “social ontology” (FW 2-3). Note that Butler does not dispense with ontological notions. Rather, her rhetorical sleight-of-hand shifts ontology from corporeality to sociality such that the body arises not from an internal conative persistence but an originary milieu discursively apprehended by the imprecise label of “interdependency”.4 In short, the body is not the body in itself. Rather, the body is what it is because it is also what it is not (“in itself,” if one problematically retains such a notion). By suggesting that the body is what it is not, Butler thereby does not rid of ontology but simply shifts what it is about; what Butler calls the “social ontology” of the body is a misnomer for “ontology is social.” While corporeal morphologies shift as social, historical, and political conditions are shuffled, what does not shift is the corporeal’s indebtedness to and continual constitution by the social, the historical, and the political. We wonder whether Butler’s explication of a new bodily ontology is purely descriptive and able to access something fundamental about the body (i.e. its emergence as a social, historical, and political figure whatever those descriptives mean at a particular temporocultural juncture) or is a performative accountframing the body as inescapably social, historical, and political in conformity with those norms predominantly governing critical theory today. In other words, to what normative criteria defining the “social,” the “historical,” and the “political” does Butler silently subscribe that enable her to elaborate her new bodily ontology? Would the body, in all its morphological manifestations through time, cleanly comport with those descriptives? Butler does suggest that “we cannot refer to [the 'being' of life] outside of the operations of power, and we must make more precise the specific mechanisms of power through which life is produced” (FW 1). My point is that she does not specify enough or carefully enough. Instead, Butler prematurely ends critical reflection on bodily ontologies by selecting a social one that allows for social and political reshuffling. Settling on a “more or less existential conception” of precariousness, conjoined with “a more specifically political notion of ‘precarity,” enables Butler to settle on the “differential allocation of precarity” that serves as “the point of departure” for conceptualizing her new bodily ontology (FW 3). It delivers to Butler the hope that grief, upon illuminating our “common human vulnerability” that stems from this new bodily ontology, will slowly enable us to identify with suffering itself.
Let Butler’s confidence in grief, vulnerability, and suffering be deflated by turning to Lauren Berlant’s critique of sentimentality. Berlant describes sentimentality as
the more popular rhetorical means by which mass subaltern pain is advanced, in the United States, as the true core of personhood and political collectivity It operates when relatively privileged national subjects are exposed to the suffering of their intimate Others, so that to be virtuous requires feeling the pain of flawed or denied citizenship as their own pain. Theoretically, those with power will do whatever is necessary to eradicate the misery they now feel vicariously, returning the nation once more to its legitimately utopian odor. Identification with pain, a universal true feeling, would thereby lead to structural change.5
While Berlant tracks the US liberal project of painful politics and its attendant affects in the formation of utopian nationhood, her remarks are of much use for our attempt to divert precarious life from the risk of sentimentalization in its coupling with grievability. For Berlant, sentimentality sets up contact zones between the systematically disenfranchised and those historically placed in closer proximity to normative citizenship in its legal and cultural manifestations; it functions as the relay through which pain and suffering reach and touch the hearts of empathic audiences across social, political, and historical fault-lines. In other words, sentimentality allows suffering to launch political projects of empathy on behalf of the beneficiaries of social injustices. Subjects of sentimental politics aim to cleanse the national imaginary of its historical blemishes in order to redeem utopian promises of a healed nationhood. They would likely embrace Butler’s new bodily ontology which seeks to cast the biopolitically marginalized as the biopolitically vulnerable in an attempt to procure something like political action arisen from the grief fueled by empathy.
The primary problem with sentimental politics is that it translates the state of feeling right into structural change. In sentimentality’s formula, pain and suffering form the metric for social injustices such that the “utopian image of a homogeneous national metaculture” appears whole and healthy.6 Politics thereby “overidentifies the eradication of pain with the achievement of justice” and, I suggest, aspires to immunize the populations under its biopolitical jurisdiction.7 This, of course, generates projects seeking to render those populations invulnerable by denying the precariousness of their own lives – a process that violently wields sovereign power against all those imagined as threats and failing to count as grievable or precarious life. Berlant further notes that the identification of eliminating pain with attaining justice makes equivalent shifts in feeling with social change; the triggering of grief and empathic dispositions strangely amounts to material change. Sentimental politics thereby “makes these confusions credible and these violences bearable, as its cultural power asserts the priority of interpersonal identification and empathy to the vitality and viability of collective life.”8 In sum, political problems regarding the exploitation of vulnerability become primarily an affective matter managed through proper feeling (i.e., through empathy, guilt, and grief) rather than collective political action aimed at structural reform.
It becomes clear that sentimentality purges the personal of anything political except feelings and feeling right; the personal becomes an affair of pain, suffering, grief, and empathy. Again, entirely impersonal forces become the personal in a normative coding process that conceals its workings. As Berlant notes, “the important transpersonal linkages and intimacies created by calls to empathy all too frequently serve as proleptic shields, as ethically incontestable legitimating devices for sustaining the hegemonic field.”9 In other words, the personalization of the impersonal seemingly naturalizes a series of practices and postures. After all, sentimentality asks, who wouldn’t be grieved by the pain of another? Who wouldn’t, driven by empathy, politically press for social justice that, in regimes of sentimentality, means eliminating suffering and reducing the felt precarity of vulnerable populations? Sentimentality reduces the personal to a matter of what Berlant calls “true feeling” whereby pain and the affects generated by it (grief, empathy) stand in as a “hard-wired truth” that lies “beyond ideology, beyond mediation, beyond contestation.”10 It tells us that, in the face of biopolitical atrocities, to feel grief is to feel right, to feel right is to be conscious with a conscience, and that feeling right tends toward empathic action. In its dealings with the disenfranchised, sentimentality accordingly highlights, among other things, the names and faces of the dead, biographical details of the suffering, and any other personal articles constituting one as a true person to be paraded as such before privileged audiences to be stirred to action.
The problem with Butler’s precarious life, then, is that it is too conjoined to grievable life. This formulation renders precarious life an ontological matter of interdependence from which a certain ethical posture and certain political actions take shape. This procedure is a sentimental one by which Butler maps personal interrelations onto an impersonal condition of the ostensible interdependency internal to the ontological. Recall that loss is a personal affair; it is apprehended as such only when one senses that a certain something is lost along with the loss felt. Butler shifts from the personal to the impersonal without justification; she uses dynamics of personal relations to discuss impersonal ones without showing how she may make such a leap. All that Butler writes of grievable life may only hold true for relations of the personal for loss is only felt as such when immersed in conditions that let it be such. Her comments, however, do not apply to the impersonal.
Butler would, of course, reply that this is precisely her point – that state power produces the impersonal in its self-immunization to deny the precariousness of life in its elimination of biopolitical others that do not count as lives. She would further say that her politics is precisely the attempt to extend the sense of loss, grief, and empathy from the personal to the impersonal by shifting the norms distributing grievability. My point is, however, that such a shift cannot occur because there is no “common human vulnerability,” no fundamental interdependency, which may enable such redistribution. Recall that Butler believes that loss has made us into a tenuous “we.” Also remember that she desires that we identify with suffering itself. She suspects that, because everyone has lost, loss potentially offers an inroad into that common human vulnerability that is more or less ontological. One could respond that Butler simply argues that the frames governing grievability ought to be redistributed so that the lives and thus the loss of those lives of the previously ungrievable may now matter. In such a defense, no particular frame, not even those specifically concerning loss, is the focus of political efforts. This reading of Butler, however, overlooks the importance she gives to loss in the redistribution of grievability. Loss directs our attention toward our struggle for recognition – a fundamental aspect of life given our social vulnerability conditioned by a world beyond our control. As Butler writes, “if we have lost, then it follows that we have had, that we have desired and loved, that we have struggled to find the conditions for our desire” (PL 20). In other words, loss points to our efforts to secure conditions for our recognition; it indicates our attempts to render our lives a project aiming for some version of the good life. Berlant has, on numerous occasions, disputed such conceptual condensations of affective atmospheres of ambiguity into sovereign subjectivities wholly geared toward utopian ends.11 Not only do they project a problematic version of subjectivity, they situate life within sentimental horizons while privileging the personal.
Can precarious life be rescued from grievable life?
III. CONCLUSION: THE EXPOSURE OF PRECARIOUS LIFE
This critique of grievable life elaborates Butler’s presupposition of interdependency as the ontological condition underlying precarious life. In Butler’s framework, interdependency is the inability for any “I” to persist as such apart from some particular “you”. Indeed, as Butler asserts, no life can persist without those conditions that provide its sustenance: “There is no life without the conditions that variably sustain life, and those conditions are pervasively social, establishing not discrete ontology of the person, but rather the interdependency of persons, involving reproducible and sustaining social relations, and relations” (FW 19). Life fundamentally depends on conditions external to its corporeal contours. The range of that dependency is, however, neither settled nor boundless. The set of conditions on which I depend at the moment may not be what I depend on in the next moment in which I may come to depend on conditions that I previously did not. To articulate this with persons as units, there is no definitive “you” or set of “yous” on whom I depend. My zone of dependency shifts over time, adopting new persons while abandoning old ones; my milieu of interdependency remains contingent. And interdependency is the grounding of the personal precisely because I belong to that milieu. At the same time, however, interdependency is not saturated through and through by the personal for I remain dependent on a whole set of impersonal conditions and persons without ever fully or ever recognizing or acknowledging such. This point recites an important characteristic of precarious life: “Precariousness implies living socially, that is, the fact that one’s life is always in some sense in the hands of the other. It implies exposure both to those we know and to those we do not know; a dependency on people we know, or barely know, or know not at all” (FW 14). In other words, while the personal characterizes but a subset of interdependency, interdependency itself characterizes but a subset of relationality. Relationality itself does not entail the connection of everyone all the time even as it necessitates some relation or another for one to persist as such. If precarious life is sustained by environments of interdependency, then interdependency itself depends on relationality as its fundamental condition.
In other words, Butler emphasizes the wrong aspect of life’s precariousness. It is relationality and not interdependence that serves as the basis of precarious life. Butler’s focus on interdependency, I suggest, leads her to attach precarious life to grievable life and, accordingly, sentimentally frame her discussion of precarious life within problematic frames of the personal. Precarious life, however, need not be sentimentalized so long it be shed of notions surrounding the personal (such as loss, grief, and empathy, for starters). It would primarily involve “being impinged upon by the exposure and dependency of others, most of whom remain anonymous” (FW 14). Of emphasis is exposure – that is, the body’s capacity to enter into and exit from relations with others. This does not mean that there is first a body that is then exposed; rather, the body comes into being and morphs in becoming through the exposure that makes it possibly. If there is an ontological condition of the body, it would be one of corporeal exposure to its outside for, as Butler insists, “precariousness has to be grasped not simply as a feature of this or that life, but as a generalized condition whose very generality can be denied only by denying precariousness itself” (FW 23). One way of maintaing precariousness as a generalized condition is to understand it in terms of exposure and not grievability since the two are not equivalents. Exposure holds the possibility of becoming grievability but need not be reduced to such.
Consequently, biopolitical violence is not only or ever concerned with differential distributions of grievability. Rather, biopolitical violence, as an exploitation of the body’s exposure, is first and foremost the nullification of relations that preclude such violence. Accordingly, Butler may be incorrect in her assertion that precarious life is “not cast outside the polis in a state of radical exposure, but bound and constrained by power relations in a situation of forcible exposure” (FW 29). I would not, as Butler does, distinguish too strongly between “radical” and “forcible” forms of exposure, for removal of the relations through which a body may find cover is a coercive process of power that intensifies exposure to increasingly grotesque violences. For as Butler writes, violence is “a way a primary human vulnerability to other humans is exposed in its most terrifying way, a way in which we are given over, without control, to the will of another, a way in which life itself can be expunged by the willful action of another” (PL 28-9). The biopolitical act casts a target population into a state of radical exposure by a self-constituted sovereign power aspiring to unravel all interrelations except one of pure violence. Agamben rightly points out that if there is a “sovereign tie” threading together the political, it is in fact an “untying,” not of some primordial social contract, but an originary inclusive exclusion that is the condition of biopolitical abandonment.12 In other words, biopolitical sovereignty intensifies and radicalizes the state of exposure faced by precarious life, not simply by severing it from networks of interrelations, but by shrinking the conditions for relations in general to emerge.
It becomes clear that a politics of loss that redistributes grievability is inadequate to address sovereignty’s attempts to abolish the body’s relational capacities. The loss of biopolitical others cannot be felt and responded to, not because those lives are constituted as ungrievable, but because there are simply no relations in place through which grief, or much else, are possibilities. If such relations are in place, then they are too impersonal, populated by anonymous others that may only be known through personalizations framed by sentimentality.
We need to develop a better political responsiveness, one that seeks to formnew networks of relations with others in which acts and structures of violence disperse tremors that we can feel and yet not own as our own. As Butler compellingly suggests, though “precariousness itself cannot be properly recognized,” it may be apprehended (FW 13). This apprehension of precarious life is not personalized and does not, in itself, issue an ethical mandate for protection and sustenance while, nonetheless, establishing the conditions in which such a mandate becomes conceivable: “We have to ask about the conditions under which it becomes possible to apprehend a life or set of lives as precarious, and those that make it less possible, or indeed impossible. Of course, it does not follow that if one apprehends a life as precarious one will resolve to protect that life or secure the condition for its persistence and flourishing” (FW 2). And so, we would begin with precariousness and exposure as the framework for conceiving challenges to unwieldy enterprises of sovereignty in its intensification of biopolitical abandonment. Because sovereignty never fully succeeds in quarantining precarious life because the body, in its exposure, remains open to relations of sustenance, protection, and respect. Drawing upon exposure as the ontological departure point for a politics of precarious life would issue an “injunction to think precariousness in terms of equality” (FW 23) for we all remain exposed to and thus in the hands of the world. We begin by asking whose hands and which world.
