Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance

JUDITH BUTLER

We know that those who gather on the street or in public domains where police are present are always at risk of detention and arrest, but also forcible handling, even death. So when we consider police violence against protestors — the killing of forty-three students assembled for a protest in Ayotzinapa, Mexico, in September 2014 is a flagrant example — it is already more than clear that those who gather to resist various forms of state and economic power are taking a risk with their own bodies, exposing themselves to possible harm.

That formulation seems true enough: vulnerability is enhanced by assembling. But perhaps we need to rethink this sequence that gives narrative structure to our understanding of the relationship between vulnerability and resistance. First you resist, and then you are confronted with your vulnerability either in relation to police power or to those who show up to oppose your political stance. Yet vulnerability emerges earlier, prior to any gathering, and this becomes especially true when people demonstrate to oppose the precarious conditions in which they live. That condition of precarity indexes a vulnerability that precedes the one that people encounter quite graphically on the street. If we also say that the vulnerability to dispossession, poverty, insecurity, and harm that constitutes a precarious position in the world itself leads to resistance, then it seems we reverse the sequence: we are first vulnerable and then overcome that vulnerability, at least provisionally, through acts of resistance.

Of course, it will be important to establish a more precise relationship between vulnerability and precarity (they are not the same), but let us consider as a clear example modes of resistance that emerge in opposition to failing infrastructure. The dependency on infrastructure for a livable life seems clear, but when infrastructure fails, and fails consistently, how do we understand that condition of life? We have found that that on which we are dependent is, in fact, not there for us, which means we are left without support. Without shelter, we are vulnerable to weather, cold, heat, and disease, perhaps also to assault, hunger, and violence. It was not as if we were, as creatures, not vulnerable before when infrastructure was working, and then when infrastructure fails, our vulnerability comes to the fore. When movements against homelessness emerge, the unacceptable character of that vulnerability (in the sense of exposure to harm) is made clear. But a question still remains: does vulnerability still remain an important part of that mode of resistance? Does resistance require overcoming vulnerability? Or do we mobilize our vulnerability?

Consider that a movement may be galvanized for the very purpose of establishing adequate infrastructure, or keeping adequate infrastructure from being destroyed. We can think about mobilizations in the shantytowns or townships of South Africa, Kenya, Pakistan, the temporary shelters constructed along the borders of Europe, but also the barrios of Venezuela, the favelas of Brazil, or the barracas of Portugal. Such spaces are populated by groups of people, including immigrants, squatters, and/or Roma, who are struggling precisely for running and clean water, working toilets, sometimes a closed door on public toilets, paved streets, paid work, and necessary provisions. The street, for instance, is not just the basis or platform for a political demand, but an infrastructural good. And so when assemblies gather in public spaces in order to fight against the decimation of infrastructural goods — for instance, to protest austerity measures that would undercut public education, libraries, transit systems, and roads — we find that the very platform for such a politics is one of the items on the political agenda. Sometimes a mobilization happens precisely in order to create, keep, or open the platform for political expression itself. The material conditions for speech and assembly are part of what we are speaking and assembling about. We have to assume the infrastructural goods for which we are fighting, but if the infrastructural conditions for politics are themselves decimated, so too are the assemblies that depend on them. At such a point, the condition of the political is one of the goods for which political assembly takes place — this might be the double meaning of "the infrastructural" under conditions in which public goods are increasingly dismantled by privatization, neoliberalism (the United States), accelerating forms of economic inequality (Greece), the antidemocratic tactics of authoritarian rule (Turkey), or the violent combination of government and cartel interests (Mexico).

I wish to point out that even as public resistance leads to vulnerability, and vulnerability (the sense of "exposure" implied by precarity) leads to resistance, vulnerability is not exactly overcome by resistance, but becomes a potentially effective mobilizing force in political mobilizations. In effect, the demand for infrastructure is a demand for a certain kind of inhabitable ground, and its meaning and force arise precisely when that ground gives way. So the street cannot be taken for granted as the space of appearance, to use Hannah Arendt's phrase — the space of politics — since there is, as we know, a struggle to establish that very ground. And Arendt is at least partially right when she claims that the space of appearance comes into being at the moment of political action. That is a romantic notion of an embodied performative speech act, to be sure, since in any time or place that we act, the space of appearance for the political comes into being. It is not always true, of course — we can try to act collectively, and no space of appearance is established, and that usually has to do with the absence of media, or particular ways that the public sphere is structured to keep such actions from appearing (e.g., zoning, permits, rules against congregating). Arendt clearly presumes that the...