Category: Meaning and Life and the Humanities

Meaninglessness and Modernity

My goal for the month is to get through Charles Taylor’s The Secular Age, which was the “it” book about ten years ago. I read 250 pages of it at the time, then put it down and only picked it up again about a month ago. Now I have managed to get through another 80 pages or so—which only leaves about 350 pages to go.

Anyway, Taylor has always been a liberal critic of liberalism—going all the way back to his first “big book,” the one on Hegel, published in 1975. He was thought of as a “communitarian” in those days because his theme was the emptiness of “negative liberty” as contrasted to the notion of “situated freedom” that he derived from Hegel. (In A Secular Age, Taylor calls the liberal, autonomous self “the buffered self,” barricaded against “communion” with others or with the world, taking a detached, “objectivist” view of things, better to maintain its disengaged, “cold” autonomy.) The basic idea was that the autonomous, disconnected self, that sits at the center of any idea of negative freedom, is so contentless that its freedom to act is basically meaningless. I was greatly influenced by Taylor in my Postmodernism and its Critics, where I took his “situated freedom” in a more materialist direction, thinking about the ways in which social structures and access to/distribution of material resources were central to any ability to act. From there, I later moved to using the term “effective freedom,” which I got from John Dewey. The notion is fairly simple: freedom is just another word for nothing unless you have the wherewithal to actually enact the things you dream of accomplishing. In other words, a certain social organization that attends to material needs is required for freedom to be enjoyed. A version, in other words, of the Marxist critique of the “formal freedoms” of a bourgeois society.

But I want now to think about Taylor’s assertion that modernity is afflicted with a certain kind of spiritual “malaise” (his word), a pervasive uneasiness (not felt by all, but by many) that their lives lack purpose or meaning. This is the nihilism that Nietzsche saw all around him, or Durkheim’s anomie, or Baudelaire’s ennui. Taylor insists this is new. “What you won’t hear at other times and places is one of the commonplaces of our day (right or wrong is beside my point), that our age suffers from a threatened loss of meaning. This malaise is specific to a buffered identity, whose very invulnerability opens it to the danger that not just evil spirits, cosmic forces or gods won’t ‘get to’ it, but that nothing significant will stand out for it” (303).

Note the hedge: Taylor doesn’t commit himself fully to asserting that modernity is truly a realm of meaninglessness. He only insists that the feeling that one lacks meaning is prevalent. And, elsewhere, he also admits that this feeling is mostly articulated by elites.

My basic reaction is to say that I don’t see it. Sufficient unto the day is the meaning thereof. What strikes me as much more evident is that the daily round, the struggle to keep life going and halfway bearable, provides more than enough purpose for most people. I am fully persuaded that meaning is generated through the daily entanglement within social practices and our relations with/to others. One possibility, I guess, is that modernity pushes more people into loneliness, into disconnected lives that exclude them from being embedded in larger social relations. And I don’t doubt that something like “modern individualism” means that some selves (again, we need to think about privilege and elites here) develop strategies that provide them greater autonomy vis a vis the social orders in which they are embedded. Buffered selves are not, however, necessarily (or even, I would argue, primarily) disconnected selves. Rather, they are selves who enjoy (I choose this word deliberately) some power within the social relations in which they are entangled. Everything we know about human social orders tells us that power will be abused where it is possessed. Which is why idealizing traditional communities, with their strict hierarchies, is either foolishly naïve or tantamount to an inegalitarian defense of privilege. As with wealth, the only good way forward is for a fuller, more equitable distribution of power. Unbuffered selves are exploited selves.

But back to nihilism. I just don’t see it (as I have said.) I am tempted to go so far as to say it takes leisure—and lots of it—to suffer from ennui. Just getting by takes all the time and attention of lots of people—and they don’t seem inclined to wonder if somehow there is more, that somehow their lives are missing something. Rather, I think it much more likely that what we have is a case of elites who disparage what keeps “ordinary people” engaged. I am thinking here of Thoreau’s claim that “most men lead lives of quiet desperation,” or even of Wordsworth’s complaint that “getting and spending takes all our power.” What is troublesome about the masses is that they don’t experience anomie, that they find “getting and spending” good enough for them, thank you very much. They aren’t searching for meaning, they are searching for a way to get ahead. Life is hard enough to keep one going; it provides plenty of purpose in its daily rounds.

Let me be clear: I don’t think it actually functions all that differently for elites. I think that they, too, are mostly sustained by the demands that each day brings, along with their own ambitions (for acclaim, recognition etc within their own social spheres). I just think elites are endlessly snobby about the form that they see non-elite desires taking. (I am somewhat channeling Bourdieu’s Distinction here, with its wonderful discussions of how elite taste scorns everything bodily and material in the name of “higher” pleasures. We arrive here at J. S. Mill’s worries about and scorn of the pleasures of the pig.) Elites may have a different content for their purposes, but I think the form is much the same, i.e. generated out of the social relations in which they are embedded.

What to conclude? 1. I am with Taylor in seeing “meaning” as a function of social entanglements. Thus, if modernity truly extracts people from such entanglements, then modernity would be afflicted by a loss of meaning. But that is a very, very different claim than saying that a secular age that only offers entanglement in the here and now—and not some kind of additional relationship to the transcendent—leaves us short of meaning or purpose. I am willing to grant to Taylor that for some people a relationship to the divine stands as an important motivator in their lives. But that is, for me, just like saying that for some people reading books, with their relationship to absent, often dead, authors is important to their lives. Many don’t read books—and never feel any absence of purpose because they don’t read. Similarly, many will do just fine without any relation to a divine.

I am suspicious, as is obvious, as anyone imputing to others a state of desperation, anomie, loss of purpose etc. I don’t quite know what would stand as evidence to back up such a claim. I suspect that, much more often, the basis for the claim is a distaste for, even incredulity about, the things in which people find purpose. Surely, the critic says, that can’t be enough to sustain a meaningful life? There must be more, there must be a longing for more. Why? Just because it wouldn’t satisfy you, that’s no evidence that it is unsatisfactory to that other guy.
I hardly want to deny the existence of despair. (Let me for the moment make a false distinction between despair and depression, where depression is [as we say these days] a “clinical” condition while despair is something produced by the external circumstances in which the self finds itself.) I suspect that despair is rarely a function of the general conditions of modernity; in other words, I don’t believe in some general malaise inflicting our (or some other) culture. Rather, despair (at least within the structures of feeling that I see as fairly general in our culture) comes from one of three sources. (Pardon the wild generalizations here.) 1. Suffering, either one’s own and [even worse] that of one’s loved ones that cannot be alleviated. 2. Being caught into dismal situations that one cannot alter or escape. Such situations can be a job which one hates because constantly humiliated or exploited or made to do things that are shameful, or caught in certain social relations that, for whatever reason, one thinks must be endured even though terrible. 3. Being excluded from entanglement in the kinds of social relations that generate meaning. The obvious case here is unemployment. Work is a central producer of meaning in modern societies. The weight (in terms of senses of self-worth and of engagement with others in a collective enterprise) placed on work in our society is truly frightening—and is what makes unemployment an existential as well as a financial disaster. I do think Taylor is good in pushing us to think about the possibility of societies which would have many more sources of meaning aside from one’s work.

Three further thoughts for today. The first is that (again, generalizing wildly) I don’t actually think religion (at least in contemporary American society) functions primarily as a source of meaning. Or if it does, it does so by way of conferring an identity and offering a set of social relations apart from work and family. I don’t think it has much to do at all with a relation to the transcendent, to god. I do think it offers some consolation for suffering, some modes of coping with sickness, death, and other ills. But it does not seem to be offering some kind of alternative path through the modern world, some other way of constructing a life. Again, for a few it does do that. But the Simone Weils among us are few and far between. For the vast majority, their religion sits comfortably with their leading completely conventional modern lives. I just don’t see where the religious in America today acknowledge or act upon some kind of “malaise,” some kind of awareness of modernity’s constitutive shortcomings. The religious, in other words, are as casually modern as the rest of us, unmoved (by all appearances) by a sense that there must be “more.” Religion is a source of meaning, yes, in that it affords participation in another, different, set of communal relations, but it hardly seems at odds with modernity. Evangelicals may deplore modern permissiveness and keep their children out of public schools, but they still associate virtue with toeing the line in a capitalist economy and find purpose in constructing a life in the here and now.

The second thought concerns “bullshit jobs.” Reading David Graeber’s book of that title is on my to-do list. The issue it raises is the extent to which people find their jobs meaningless. Again, I suspect this is an elitist projection. I could never find that job meaningful, so how could someone else. There must be millions and millions of people unhappy at work, pushing paper and doing it only out of raw economic necessity, the elite observer opines.

I spent eight years running an institute, with eight to ten employees underneath me. At least four of them did jobs I could never stand doing for more than three weeks. But they were conscientious and engaged workers. Some were less competent than others, but the less competent ones were, in some ways, even more engaged because it took all of their effort and attention not to screw up. There was some grousing, of course, about various kinds of bureaucratic requirements that created work for our staff, but, generally speaking, loyalty to our little platoon trumped issues about the meaningfulness of (or need for) the work that had to get done. In short, like soldiers (as every study of them has shown), the meaning is generated out of the relation to one’s comrades, one’s fellow workers, without much attention paid (no less worrying about) larger meanings or purposes or the larger organization’s stated goals (or “mission” in today’s jargon.) Thus, cynicism about the larger organization (again, a mainstay of soldier’s lives) can easily be combined with a deep, and satisfying, engagement with the daily round of tasks performed in the company of a group of comrades.

As I say, I will read Graeber, since he has done some field work among those who have bull shit jobs—and maybe he will convince me that a pervasive sense of meaninglessness exists among such workers. For now, I don’t see an epidemic of meaninglessness all around me.

Third, and finally, I do however see an epidemic of depression (coupled with its evil twin, anxiety). But I see it as produced by the crisis of work. Even in 1951, Arendt (in Origins of Totalitarianism) could point to the problem of “superfluouness,” her euphemism for unemployment. The idea was that the Depression created the opening for fascism. People want to be needed, to be put to work, to be asked to join something, to be given something to join. The Nazis offered the nation, while the work was war. Our current epidemic of depression is caused by the lack of work—and the deep insecurity of those who do have jobs. [Neat that the same word, depression, stands for the economic condition that causes unemployment and the psychological condition that follows upon unemployment.] For our young people, finding a job that in some ways matches up with what they were educated to do has become a terrifying—and often unsuccessful—quest as the ranks of the solidly middle class are depleted. For our blue collar workers, either the jobs have disappeared forever or are on the verge of disappearing. Here is where the devil of the modern location of primary meaning in employment makes its horrors most felt. We need to proliferate the sites of meaning production, of social entanglement in cooperative endeavors that strike people as meaningful. We have to learn how not to work—and to not feel bad when we are not working. And if there are bullshit jobs, ones that people find utterly meaningless, then the problem is compounded.

Perhaps (it is at least a plausible argument) the loss of a sense of transcendence, of a relation to the divine, partly causes the way meaning gets so centered in work in the modern age. And if meaning and work are so entangled, an end to work (on the personal level as involuntary unemployment, and on a societal level with the advent of robots) is a disaster that we need to figure out how to address. But I still want to say that engagement in the things of this world, with the people with whom we share it, provides plenty of meaning for the vast majority. If there is a “malaise,” it is a product of the specific ill of unemployment (taking that term in its largest possible sense of exclusion from doing things with others) that is to blame, not some sickness unto death lodged in the modern soul. And if the remedy is to learn how to find meaning in things apart from work, that doesn’t necessarily entail turning our eyes away from the things of this world.

Moten and Harney, The Undercommons

The political/literary theory reading group to which I belong (and which meets once a year) read Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons this year and we were privileged to have Fred Moten join us for our discussion.

When I read the book in early June, my reaction was that it was anarchist gobblygook. I was somewhat mollified by the interview with M&H that comprises the last 1/3 of the book and which presented a much more palatable (at least to me) vision of what they were up to. The conversation with Moten himself was even more to my taste; the style of the book is deliberately associative, more a riff, or an improvisation, than a formal argument—in large part because M&H hate “formality” as tyrannical and are very much against any notion of the avant-garde or critique or any other pretension to having a truth or a knowledge to deliver. They want to inspire, to provoke, to set things in motion, to put things into flight (shades of Deleuze), and to celebrate (create? perform?) incompleteness.

M&H have any number of things they want to reject/refuse. But the two big ones are politics and individuation. Politics is pernicious precisely because it insists on the formation of subjects, of individuals, who then step forward to ask for recognition, to make claims on the basis of rights, to articulate interests that must be taken into account, and to grab/claim a share of goods. The very act of subject formation, of individuation, sets in motion a credit/debt accounting, a parceling out of responsibility, and of owing that M&H want to get out from under. So they are with the various leftists I have been discussing these past few months in seeing the making of political demands only as a trap that legitimizes the powers and institutions to which the demands are addressed. Moten told us that he rejected everything that Arendt designated as politics.

Yet . . . M&H also accept that the current order of things is rotten to the core. Modernity is constituted by anti-blackness, by the exclusion of the black subject even as that black body’s labor is extracted from it. Blacks are “conscripts of modernity”—and it would be a terrible mistake for them to see their goal (political or otherwise) as admission to the condition of the rights-bearing modern subject. “You have denied us a place in modernity even as we are the condition of its emergence and persistence. Don’t delude yourselves that what we want is what you have. We want something utterly different.”

What is that utterly different thing? Here is where is gets both inspiring and weird. Moten fully admitted to a romanticism of “black sociality.” There is nothing wrong with us (blacks). We are already doing what we want to do, being who we want to be, in the fullness of black sociality (which also goes by the name of the “undercommons.”) M&H aspire to a fundamental affirmation; black life is not about lack or deprivation; black life, instead, is a rich set of practices and entanglements that were created “in the hold” of modernity, out of a need to live otherwise. The basic message: “We are here. You can’t get rid of us (as much as you might want to). And we won’t be placated by the crumbs you think to push our way. But we have our own world, the one we have created in your despite, and we just want to live in that world, as untroubled by you as possible.”

An odd kind of quietism. Just leave us alone. We don’t want to partake of your madness. We ask nothing of you; just stop bothering us. Yet—Moten also said “anti-blackness” is what is going to kill me, just as it killed my father and my grandfather, and it will kill my children. Because whites can’t just leave blacks alone since modernity is dependent on the exploitation of blacks. Moten also said that anti-blackness will kill everyone—even (maybe especially Donald Trump) because modernity is poison. But that description of a murderous modernity makes the affirmation of a quietist sociality harder to stomach. Living in the interstices (Ellison’s invisible man) is a completely understandable strategy. But it is surely a second best. Is there no hope, no politics, that can address modernity’s crimes and mis-steps?

Of course, the whole thing is also premised on the notion that modernity is an unmitigated disaster. Moten, as Nick Bromell pointed out, is a radically undialectical thinker. There is no interplay between individuation (form) and the play of differences (the Deleuzian flux), just as there is no interplay between politics (public work toward justice) and sociality (informal, unstructured being together), or between modernity and its other(s). Just condemnation of politics, individuation and modernity—and an attempt to build a world elsewhere, apart. Modernity and individuation and politics are madness pure and simple; they thrust us into ways of living that are actually prolonged flirtations with death—ending in a full embrace of death.

That Moten is now reading the medieval mystics comes as no surprise. The longing for an elsewhere is deeply attractive when articulated so poetically by someone like Moten. Especially when the claim is that the elsewhere is always already here—hidden in plain sight, embodied in moments of being together, of conversation and collaboration that are taken as ends (joys) in themselves, not aimed to the production of anything (be it status or a commodity or knowledge). On some level, it just seems right to say that life is best lived in the company of others and unproductively. And it is great to have M&H break ties with “leftist anti-humanism” and straight-forwardly take “life” as their lodestar, that which they aim to serve and foster. But if the powers that thwart life, that worship and impose death, are so big, then to escape seems highly unlikely—and a privilege few will be able to access.

It increasingly comes to seem to me that the Nietzschean problematic of “affirmation” is everywhere. How can we affirm “life,” instead of constantly looking for ways to escape it, or transform it, or control it, or to put it into the service of something else. Why if life so hard to love?

Meaningful and Meaningless

I am currently reading Terry Eagleton’s Radical Sacrifice (Yale UP, 2018), which is a typical Eagleton book: breezy, opinionated, easy going down. Eagleton always gives me things to chew on. Yes, his late religious turn is annoying. So far, this book is built around the perverse effort to convince us that the crucifixion is not comic (i.e. leading to the happy ending of the resurrection), but the aufgeheben of sacrifice because it demonstrates how sacrifice leads to nothing. A quixotic enterprise.

But I want to think about something rather different here. Eagleton gives us his version of the idea that life is so precious, so valuable, exactly because we know it is temporary. Death, in other words, gives life value. Maggie Nelson quotes Elaine Scarry a few times in her (Nelson’s) book on the art of cruelty as saying that beauty calls forth our urge to protect it, to act justly toward it, precisely because the beautiful is so fragile, so vulnerable, so transitory. Nelson retorts that those same qualities can also incite cruelty and violence. The beautiful thing can enrage us in its helplessness, its forlorn fragility. Something in us wants to throw a brick through that beautiful plate glass window.

Can the same thing be said of life (i.e. that its fragility can call forth aggression)? I am not sure; my thought today is a bit tangential to that idea. Death, I think, is utterly meaningless. A simple, but total, void. It is very hard to process the idea that at death consciousness simply ceases; that there is nothingness beyond that door. It is not a passage into something else. It is just a complete and utter end. All darkness. In many ways, this fact is unthinkable. We are so used to consciousness, to processing our experiences, that the very idea of no experience and no consciousness is a void so complete that we cannot comprehend it. Various artists—those addicted to the sublime—can even find this void seductive. But more usual is to refuse to believe it. It is a truism that it is very hard to believe in one’s death. But I go further: it is very hard to believe in death at all.

Even though, at the same time, we process the death of others with remarkable casualness. Very, very few ever consider not carrying on themselves when a loved one dies. Certainly that thought doesn’t arise when a spouse dies. It is more likely to be the response to one’s child’s death. Even then, adding my death to my child’s is not very common. In short, death is both unthinkable and something we live through with relative aplomb. We move on—as the saying goes.

The meaninglessness of death heightens, clarifies, the meaningfulness of life. So that life is not just precious and valuable, but also replete with meaning. It is, in some ways, a task we are handed with life: make sure this life is meaningful, work at making it meaningful. But, in other ways, life is condemned to meaning, as Merleau-Ponty put it. We can’t avoid telling stories about it, examining it, imputing significance to its various incidents. That the void of death will be as blank as the void before birth is always hovering there as an incitement to meaning.

But—and here is the scary thought—if the value of life is heightened, highlighted, by the nothingness of death, then the value of life is perhaps best demonstrated by the embrace of death. I don’t quite know how to make that logic lucid. It’s a statement I want to flesh out, but don’t know quite how to do so at this moment.

Here’s a cousin of that thought that is easier to explain. Since life is so valuable and its value disappears with death, then the most potent way humans have to dramatize the value of something else (i.e. something that is not life, but which a self also insists is valuable) is to lay down one’s life for that other thing. This is the power of martyrdom. Freedom (to take one example) is so valuable, that I will trade my life for it—even though, of course, my dead self cannot enjoy the freedom I have sacrificed my life for. I guess we can reverse the formula: an unfree life is not valuable, is not worth living.

Why this thought is scary is because it traps humans into what comes to seem an inescapable game of chicken. You claim something is valuable? Then prove it. Lay down your life for it. Not a game that anyone can win. It just creates devastation, meaninglessness, death all around it. They create a desert and call it noble belief that some things are so valuable, so sacred, that they are worth dying for. The problem is that life is the ultimate standard of value—and so humans are pushed to place it on the table as their wager in disputes over what is valuable. You are not really serious, the logic goes, until you put your life on the line. And other humans are all too ready to take that life when it is wagered in that way.

A final, different, thought: it is also always shocking for one of my sensibilities, one to whom my own life and the lives of those around me feel utterly precious, to witness the casualness with which others give up their lives. Soldiers come first to mind, but there are also the ranks of the reckless, the thoughtless, who put themselves in danger’s way. Either they are suffering from a delusion of invulnerability (usually the explanation offered for the foolhardy behavior of males between the ages of 14 and 24) or (what I suspect is more usually the case) they have never believed their lives are worth much. Nothing in their world has introduced or reinforced that idea. To forfeit one’s life heedlessly is an indictment of the world that has not bred into your bone the belief that one’s life matters, that it is significant, that its unfolding and its continuance is full of meaning.

Yet another perspective on these themes: sacrifice functions as a way to make the meaningless (death) meaningful. Since the sacrifice aims to extract something of value from death, to make death something that provides “a return,” it can be seen as an attempt to bring death into a narrative that confers meaning upon it. Thus, sacrifice not only enacts a control over death (i.e. that humans, through their social order and its institutions get to decide the time, place and manner of death in stark contrast to the usual fact that death is visited upon us from without), but the death also bears fruit, has a purpose, is not the stark and simple end of life, but a contributor to life.

More radically—or perhaps it is more phantasmagorically—sacrifice can be seen as the dissolution of identity, of self, required to pass into a new, transformed (presumably better or more desirable) self. This is the logic of baptism—a feigned death by drowning—taken literally. The stale status quo must be put to death in order to clear the stage for the appearance of the new. Violence as a midwife, as a creator. The trouble, of course, is that this seems a Pyrrhic victory. Unless the death is not literal, but some kind of staged representation (thus the dramatic art of tragedy), the dead person is not around to enjoy his or her new identity/reality. In short, such thinking is way too close for my tastes to the oft-heard notion that a good war is just what this decadent society needs to “cleanse” it of its ills. This idea is no more attractive when it takes a left-wing form (imagining the end of capitalism through a violent revolution) than it is in its right-wing variants.

In sum: the attempt to make death meaningful may prove much, much worse than an acceptance of its full meaninglessness. Making it meaningful stands as a sore temptation to inflict it or embrace it—in order to secure the meanings one claims it can contain and, even, unlock. Better it seems to me to maintain that life is the locus of value and death the dissolution of that value—and thus to shun death until it proves itself unavoidable. Anything that encourages humans to aid death in its work should be viewed with suspicion.

Judith Butler on Life

Have just finished reading Judith Butler’s Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Harvard UP, 2015), which is a bit of a slog since it is repetitive and not leavened with many concrete examples. But Butler appears obsessed with the same issues and problems that occupy much of my mental space, so I was grateful to find I am not alone in my worries or entirely off the rails. I also pretty much agree with most of her political intuitions and ambitions. As when I read Dewey, I find that I think Butler is right 80% of the time—and there are very few writers with whom I find myself in such alignment.

To the point: Butler just forthrightly declares that Arendt is wrong about “life.” What Arendt fails to register is that the means for life are “differentially distributed”—and that such distribution is a matter of politics, of power. It is, therefore, not just wrong but a matter of pernicious blindness to place the question of sustaining life outside the realm of politics, at the same time condemning those whose lives are overwhelmingly (out of necessity) devoted to “labor,” to securing the means of survival, to nonappearance in the political space of appearances.

Butler ends up, though she is adamantly resistant to admitting it, in a position akin to that of Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach. Here is the key Butler paragraph:

“We have mentioned that bodies cannot be understood at all without the environments, the machines, and the social organization of interdependency upon which they rely, all of which form the conditions of their persistence and flourishing. And finally, even if we come to understand and enumerate the requirements of the body, do we struggle only for those requirements to be met? As we have seen, Arendt surely opposed that view. Or do we struggle as well for bodies to thrive, and for lives to become livable? As I hope to have suggested, we cannot struggle for a good life, a livable life, without meeting the requirements that allow a body to persist. It is necessary to demand that bodies have what they need to survive, for survival is surely a precondition for all other claims we make. And yet, that demand proves insufficient since 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. One can survive without being able to live one’s life. And in some cases, it surely does not seem worth it to survive under such conditions. So, an overarching demand must be precisely for a livable life, that is, a life that can be lived” (208-209, emphasis Butler’s).

Butler says a little bit more about this idea of a “livable life,” but not much. She fights shy, as we would expect (and hope), of identifying any single standard by which we could judge a life’s “worth.” But her very appeal to the notion that life requires more than just survival, along with her use (throughout the book) of the term “flourishing,” means that her politics must function on two levels.

Level one is the minimalist level/position. Here the point is to protest stringently against all those forms of power and social organization that deny survival to people (and, perhaps, other beings). Along with that protest should come attempts to imagine—and even to embody—alternative organizations that do meet the “requirements” of “persistence.” In seeing those requirements as “preconditions,” Butler points toward what, in my terms, I would consider a “floor,” a minimal set of primary goods (to use Rawls’s terms) all (with no exceptions) can access. In our horrible political moment, when a resurgent right wing can openly declare its desire to deny such access (to health care, to clean air and water, to safe working conditions, to protection from state violence and from war) to some populations, insistence on that minimum has assumed a new importance. Egalitarianism in our current context takes, I believe, this form of insisting on a minimalist provision of those things that meet the “requirements of persistence.”

But Butler, like everyone who approaches this topic, takes the position that the minimalist position is not enough. It is not even clear that it should take logical or political priority. A minimalist life is not obviously a life that can be affirmed. “[I]n some cases,” as Butler puts it, “it surely does not seem worth it to survive under such conditions.” Life shouldn’t just survive, it should flourish.

And it is with that term “flourish,” [which comes from an Aristotelean tradition that Butler, in an off-hand remark earlier in the book calls “outdated” (194)] that Nussbaum’s work can prove useful. When Butler goes to flesh out what makes a life livable, she highlights “the complex relationalities” in which any body is entangled and advocates a politics that “understand[s] and attend[s] to the complex set of relations without which we do not exist at all” (209). This thought, not unsurprisingly, leads Butler into a bit of a swamp. How to think our inevitable dependency (our lives cannot persist, no less flourish without relations to other beings that also make us dependent and vulnerable) without reinforcing all the forms of dependency that power installs? In short, we need to find ways to manage dependency, to organize it, that do not enable differential access to the means of persistence and flourishing. To put in another way: the inevitable fact of dependency provides a worrisome perfect opportunity for the establishment of non-egalitarian hierarchies.

Butler’s core philosophical position (her transcendental claim in her recent books) is the dependency of the human condition (to use Arendt’s terms) or, more broadly, the condition of all planetary life. I use “transcendental” here in its Kantian sense—and Butler is performing what I called elsewhere “transcendental blackmail.” If we accept that she has identified “necessary,” inescapable conditions of our existence, then she has us where she wants us. We must come to terms with dependency because we are all dependent, whether we want to be or not.

From there, her argument must operate on three levels. The first is to oppose those who would deny that dependency is our basic condition. Here Butler retains the psychoanalytic perspective that has retreated to the margins in her recent work (as contrasted to earlier work like Gender Trouble and The Passionate Attachment to Subjection.) Humans are prone to “disavow” dependency, to fantasize a self-sufficiency that aims to escape the vulnerability to others that dependency entails. And the psychic/political costs of disavowal, especially in its generation of aggression against anything that threatens the delusion, are high.

The second level we might call the egalitarian one. Here we get the political position I have called minimalist, with its commitment to an egalitarian distribution of vulnerability—and to the resources by which we (as a political community) attempt to protect ourselves from “precarity,” from the fact that every life is open to the forces that can end life. None of us, ultimately, is protected from death. The actual things that will cause my death and the date of that death are contingent; but the fact that I will die is not contingent. Politics involves, among other things, an attempt to protect selves against untimely (premature) and unnecessary (gratuitous) death. That is where “biopolitics” enters: public health measures so I don’t die of cholera or influenza when certain actions could minimize my chances of contracting such diseases, or food distribution systems that prevent malnutrition and starvation, or refugee provisions that protect selves against state violence and/or war. The idea seems to be that there are preventable deaths, even if death itself cannot be prevented, and that politics rightfully attends to securing “life” wherever possible. To that extent, Butler is with Ruskin—and against Arendt, Taylor, and (maybe) Foucault, all of whom are deeply suspicious of a politics organized around “life” as a (if not “the”) supreme good.

The third level brings us to flourishing. Mere survival is not enough. In some conditions (in prison or a concentration camp) perhaps survival is not even a good. Such lives, in Butler’s incantatory phrase, are not deemed “livable.” So a politics should demand more than attention to the conditions of life’s persistence. Biopolitics is not enough if it only attends to biology, to the requirements of the body. Here is where the notion of “flourishing” enters—and the only specific thing Butler has to say about flourishing is that it involves the question of our relations to others—where others are not just human beings, but the whole ensemble of beings and things with whom we co-inhabit the planet. (Is this the Arendtian “world”? I think yes and no—and may take up the complexity of that question in a future post.)

Nussbaum goes much, much further in trying to specify what would qualify as flourishing. Nussbaum certainly highlights “affiliation” in her list of ten things that flourishing encompasses. She (Nussbaum) does not base the need to have relations with others that are sustaining and fulfilling on the basis of a shared dependency as Butler would, but she does recognize sociality (my term, not hers) as constitutive of life itself. To block the capacity to have families or friends (as American slavery did, for example) is to deny a fundamental requirement of life, even if the person so deprived has enough food and shelter and rest to survive. The third level, then, of a politics of life attends to those things above the minimalist requirements for survival that are part and parcel of a “full” or “flourishing” life.

Butler does not go into specifics, I think, for a whole host of reasons—and most of them are not good reasons. To put it most bluntly, I think it’s a failure of courage. To remain on the level of slogan and abstraction—the level of Butler’s repeated appeal to her notion of a “livable life,” with less frequent employment of the word “flourishing”—is to avoid risking offending anyone by listing concrete requirements for flourishing. Butler has always been hyper-sensitive (an artefact of her early formation in the schools of Hegel and Derrida) to the ways that any positive term both excludes and relies upon the negative. So, for example, Butler avoids the difficult issue of autonomy. Surely, Butler believes that flourishing would include the ability to make some basic choices for oneself: about religious belief, about where to live, about career, about romantic/sexual partners. But she is clearly also committed to the view that autonomy is precarious at the least, and a delusion at the worst. How, then, to affirm some kind of autonomy while also acknowledging how a self’s existence in a web of social, cultural, emotional, and dependent relationships qualifies that autonomy? Or, even worse, how to think through the ways that attempts to achieve autonomy are, in some cases, not only counter-productive but positively destructive? Butler, as a thinker, is allergic (it seems to me) to thinking through trade-offs and compromises among competing goods. By remaining on a certain level of abstraction, she can avoid such messiness.

So let me end by laying my cards on the table. I think that I find Butler’s recent work so appealing, so consonant with my own worries and obsessions, because I think hers is a liberal sensibility in the Richard Rorty way of describing that sensibility. Rorty calls it “bleeding heart liberalism,” a deep disgust at the suffering that humans inflict on other humans (which can now be extended to a disgust with the way humans treat non-human beings and the environment) and the consequent attempt to organize politics to minimize suffering. Add to that sensibility the egalitarian insistence that all humans have an equal claim to be protected from suffering—and to live a full life—and you get the fundamentals of liberalism. The details (where the devil resides) is in how to organize the polity to advance those goods. But the emotional bases of liberalism lie in that antipathy to inflicted suffering—no matter what the source (the state, the corporation, the bully) of that suffering.

But there is also another way of thinking about liberalism, the Isiah Berlin way, and here Butler fights shy of liberalism. Berlin’s focus was on plural goods and trade-offs. Basically, he was saying that humans can’t get it all to work logically and seamlessly, that our beautiful philosophical models, logically coherent, can never be materialized. Instead, we live amidst the endless contestation of competing goods, many of which are fully worthy of endorsement, but which cannot be all realized simultaneously. It is learning how to live with, manage, and tolerate compromises—even as whatever trade-off we have accepted today will be rejected and revised tomorrow—that characterizes a certain kind of pragmatic liberalism. Call it “good enough” politics (echoing Melanie Klein on mothering), with the added proviso that any arrangement will only be temporary, and will always fail to satisfy someone. Politics is endless wrangling—and thus deeply unsatisfying. But the dream of ending the wrangling is the stuff of the ever present frustration with parliamentary democracy—and most often fuels authoritarian visions that hope to transcend the displeasures of pluralism.

I am not accusing Butler of being an authoritarian thinker. She is as wary of being authoritarian as any writer that I know. But I do think that wariness leads her to pull her punches fairly often. She won’t take a concrete stand for fear of seeming to want to legislate. But I take Berlin’s point to be that legislation is something we need to do, even as every act of legislation is an imperfect compromise, an unsatisfying trade-off. We can’t get what we want, and all too often don’t get what we need. But holding out for the perfect is no solution to that dilemma. As Rorty always insisted, we are in the realm of the comparative when it comes to making judgments about political decisions, actions, and arrangements. We are not in a position to identify—even less to enact—the best. We are only in a position to consider if this action, arrangement, law, decision is better than that one. Butler only does that kind of judging at a very high level of abstraction, where a livable life is better than a non-livable one.