Institutions

Have just finished reading Luc Boltanski’s On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation (Polity, 2011), a terrific book. Hope to post at least three or four times with comments and thoughts it inspires.

Right now, I want to work through his account of institutions, since I have been complaining for months that the allergy to institutionalization found in contemporary social movements and in Hannah Arendt (as well as in many other places) severely hampers the potential effectiveness of a would-be leftist politics.

Boltanski recognizes that there are many competing definitions of institutions out there. Boltanski takes a roughly functionalist approach himself (although I am sure he would hate to see it characterized as such). He accepts the William James (he doesn’t cite James, but he does call himself a pragmatist) notion of our selves embedded in a “blooming, buzzing confusion,” the “flux” or the “flow” of time and events that generates the “stream” of consciousness as one perception or thought succeeds another. Boltanski calls this flux, this onslaught, “the world.” We can assimilate his notion of “the world” to James’s interest in “the more.” The world is always more than we can take in; it always exceeds our conceptual and perceptual powers; any picture or representation we might produce of the world will always fall short of fully, completely representing it (we might want to go Heideggerian here and think of the “age of the world picture” but without Heidegger’s insistence that this is a modern pathology).

To survive in the flux, any society must construct some stabilities, some things that can be taken for granted. Boltanski calls that construction “reality.” Crucially, reality is necessarily a collective product—and Boltanski’s reasoning for that claim (which he underwrites with an appeal to J. L. Austin’s notion of “felicity”) could be tied back to James’s radical empiricism essays (“How Two Minds Can Know One Thing,” and “Is Radical Empiricism Solipsistic”) as well as to Wittgenstein’s denial of the possibility of a “private language.” “An institution is a bodiless being to which is delegated the task of stating the whatness of what is” (Boltanski, 75)—i.e. of fixing in place a certain version of “reality” that has a stability and permanence that stands over against the “uncertainty” that characterizes individual existence in the flux. “That is why the phenomenology of institutions attributes to them as an essential property: their capacity to establish enduring or even, in a sense, eternal entities. Unlike the individual bodies of those who give them a voice, serve them, or simply live and die in spheres of reality they [institutions] help to cohere and to last, they seem removed from the corruption of time” (75).

The “more” however, the world, insures the ever present possibility of critique. There is always something (shall we call it the “excluded” as Derrida or Butler would, or the “remainder” in a Bataille sense?) that the current version of reality fails to take into account—and critique will, in the most radical instances, launch itself from the effort to bring that remainder back into the picture. Reality can be shown to be insufficient to the plenitude of the world. Reality, a radical critique insists, must be deconstructed because of that insufficiency.

In two senses, then, Boltanksi actually sees critique as dependent on institutions (the two exist in an endless pas de deux that resists any resolution in some Hegelian aufgeheben.) First, some stability is required for there to be any common language at all, for entities like “nation” and “society” or concepts like “freedom” and “justice” to make enough sense to allow us to argue about them. If neither social orders nor selves ever cohered enough to be identifiable (to be describable), critique could not get off the ground. Humans would not be able to speak to one another—or to make any kind of sense of experience. Sociology, in Boltanksi’s view, must always have both a descriptive and a critical mission. We can generalize this point to any political discourse: it must offer an analysis/account of current political reality and normative judgments about that reality. It may, also, offer an imaginative (projective) vision of an alternative configuration—but this third leg is not strictly necessary.

Second, critique must always have a target—and that target is the currently prevailing version of reality constructed and preserved by institutions. Without the work done by institutions, no critique.

How do institutions do that work? Primarily, in Boltanski’s view, it is semantic work. Institutions fix the meaning of things, most importantly “the establishment of types” (75). He adopts the pragmatist emphasis on “situations,” that is, the notion that selves (because of the flow of time) continually find themselves in new settings, faced with different people, different environments, different needs, different demands upon them, different bodily abilities (today I am sick, yesterday I was well; today I am 60, yesterday I was 35). Novelty and change are constant—and are the source of the “uncertainty” that institutions exist to manage (although without ever achieving complete control; the flow of time and the novelties it introduces cannot be stopped.)

Following Dewey’s account of judgment (although, once more, without any actual nod to Dewey), Boltanski offers a dualistic definition of situation: “The situation is identified, on the one hand, by reference to a certain context in which the action occurs and, on the other, by the meaning given to this context by relating it to a determinate type of action” (69). Confronted by a novel setting, the individual processes it by judging what kind (or type) of situation this is. Analogy and similarity—subsuming the singular into a more general set—allows us to escape complete befuddlement. Judgment moves from the particular to the general: this object is a chair not a sofa; this painting is beautiful; that action is wrong; this context is a lecture not performance art or surgery. And it does so by constructing (asserting) some kind of similarity between this instance of beauty and other instances of beauty—and so on for the other examples. Wittgenstein loosened up the requirements for similarity by talking of “family resemblances” as contrasted to shared “essences” (of a Platonic or any other sort).

The work of judgement (as Aristotle and Kant both acknowledged in their own way) is notoriously imprecise. The rules that might govern judgment are severely under-determinative, especially for aesthetic and moral judgments. But even scientific and empirical judgments are iffy. Think of a medical diagnosis. We say two people have Parkinson’s disease, but the trajectory of their condition and their response (or lack of response) to attempted treatments can vary widely. Aristotle falls back on “practical wisdom” (phronesis) as the guarantor of good judgment, while Kant (at least for aesthetic judgments) relies on “good taste.” Such groundings don’t look much better than hand-waving. And then along come the post-structuralists to insist that every assimilation of the singular to a generalizing category represses all that is not similar, all that is unique and (it is implied) should be cherished.

Institutions exist, then, for Boltanksi to create and maintain the “types,” the categories—a necessarily collective enterprise (both the creation and the maintenance). I can’t unilaterally declare this lecture absurdist theater and expect that judgment to stick—but if I trade on the authority vested in me by an institution (I am a New York Time reporter) or convince a significant of number of people that my naming it so is sound, then that judgment might just hold—or, at least, be taken under serious consideration. Creativity in the arts and in politics, after all, is very often re-naming something. You call that a labor contract, I call it exploitation—and the battle is engaged.

Most formally, institutions fix categories (types) by establishing laws—and can enforce their categories with sanctions. (Hence the law distinguishes murder from self-defense, and even distinguishes among first-degree, second-degree, voluntary manslaughter, involuntary manslaughter and the like, specifying the appropriate sanction for each gradation. Case law then concerns itself with determining—making a judgment—about where in the available general schema does this particular instance of inflicted death belong, a point open—quite obviously in the courtroom setting—to contention.)

Institutions, thus, are powerful; they are sites where power is collected, the power to create and the power to enforce. There are other sub-legal institutions; a university, for example, cannot legally punish a student for failing to come to class (although truancy laws give elementary schools that kind of legal power) but can sanction them with a bad grade or by refusing to grant them credit. Professional organizations wield similar kinds of power, as does any institution that controls participation (who gets to participate and who does not) and insists on allegiance to certain shared principles, aims, and definitions, while also arbitrating how particular behavior is to be categorized (as ethical or not for instance, or up to professional standards or not).

It is no wonder, then, that the left is so often allergic to institutionalization—because the left remains terrified of power and temperamentally loath to punish. (Let me say that a deep distaste for punishment of any kind is deeply ingrained in me. I have never understood negative reinforcement of even the mildest sorts; my response to it has always been to walk away, with an outraged sense that no one has the right to talk to me or treat me in that way. I am equally averse to using negative reinforcement myself. I have always, in my teaching, used praise and exhorting a student to push her talents to the utmost as my mode of feedback.) The ruthlessness of Communism (with its purges, violent in Russia, but painful enough in the non-violent forms used in the West—read Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook for one vivid picture) from 1930 to 1956 only heightened the suspicion of institutions which policed membership for many on the left, seeming to reinforce the conviction that when politics strays from the path of anti-institutionalism, only disaster can result.

How do institutions function on the ground? Boltanski imagines them as sites of justification; they not only establish reality, but also must submit that reality to “tests” that reveal its 1) strength and 2) justice. Strength tests are about the maintenance of a particular regime of reality against competitors. So, for example, we can say that the nation-state was the preeminent institutional form from 1660 (or so) until 1945. But now globalized capital and the rise of international organizations/law have challenged the nation-state’s hegemonic ability to create the common sense of those who live within its territory (my use of Gramscian terms here is deliberate.) Institutions that are not organized primarily in relation to jurisdiction over a territory have arisen to challenge the nation-state form. The ability of the nation-state to collect corporate taxes poised against the trans-national corporation’s ability to evade those taxes would count as a test of strength. If the state fails that test, citizens will begin to question its effectiveness and may look for more effective institutions to serve their needs. Certainly one central test of strength in today’s world is the contest between the state and the market.

But there are also justificatory tests. An unchallenged (or mostly unchallenged) institution will conduct what Boltanski calls “tests of truth.” Such tests are close to tautological; they function to reinforce the already hegemonic common sense (or reality) that the institution exists to maintain. An example of a test of truth would be the staging of elections that are then taken to demonstrate the democratic nature of the political order. Democracy is defined in terms of elections while having an election serves to prove one lives in a democracy. Perhaps a virtuous circle, but recognizably a circle. Institutions constantly trumpet examples that demonstrate that the institution is what it says it is, that it is functioning in alignment with its stated purpose and/or ideals.

The first level of critique comes with what Boltanski calls “tests of reality.” Here the critic criticizes how the “tests of truth” are actually being performed. Thus, someone who says US elections are not truly democratic because of the influence of money is pointing to the flaws in the test—and calling for a reform of the test such that its enactment would actually prove what it is claimed that it proves. Criticizing tests in this way can take a variety of forms, but the point is always to show that the existing test does not demonstrate the fact it is claimed to reveal—and to show how a different test would do the job better. For Boltanksi, such conflicts over tests are everywhere—but they are not radical critiques because they do not question the overall goal or telos. The ideal of democracy is not questioned, only whether our regime is truly democratic and what exact tests would accurately reveal if the regime is democratic or not. So these tests are “pragmatic” in the sense that they focus on doing the job at hand better; they do not question whether we should even be invested in doing that job.

Finally, there are existential tests, which do raise those kinds of radical questions about both ideals (goals) and about fundamental structures. Such critiques, as I have already indicated, rely on a claim about “the world” (existential conditions) in order to question the more limited “reality” that institutions create and maintain.

Boltanski’s pragmatic sociology calls on the sociologist to focus on “disputes,” on actual instances at existing social sites where members of a society disagree about the “tests’ being conducted or about the very ends being pursued. This move is particularly important because it also entails identifying the norms (as well as the interests) that underlie such disputes. Boltanski wants to avoid a) importing the norms of critique from outside the existing social sphere; he wants an immanent critique that grows out of the things that current social members evidently care about, as demonstrated by where they take their stand in current disputes and by the kinds of reasons and arguments they proffer in waging those disputes; and b) he wants to avoid any sense that social actors are deluded, are dupes, or exist in some kind of false consciousness. In taking their stands at various sites and in various contestations, actors demonstrate where their commitments are as well as their understanding (judgments) of the situations in which they are embedded. Any work of emancipation should begin from—and honor—those commitments and judgments.

And yet . . .

More to say on this topic—but I will leave that for the next post.

Assembly

I said, perhaps, far too little about Hardt and Negri’s Assembly when I finished reading it a few months back. Since then, I have read Todd Gitlin on Occupy, della Porta on Social Movements in Times of Austerity (Polity, 2015), and Judith Butler’s Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly.

One theme is the performative nature of assembly: how it can create the collective that proposes to make a political statement/intervention, and (even more) how it can create the kind of community to which those who assemble aspire. The assembly is “prefigurative.” That is the term that is used. It is the change it wishes to see in the world.

My skeptical objection has been consonant with most responses to anarchism: a) how does the assembly propose to produce/gather the resources that would make it sustainable?; b) is the assembly scalable? If it proposes itself as a model of the desired polis, then how does it grow to accommodate much larger numbers of members/participants?; and c) what kinds of structures, organization, leadership, communications, and other infrastructure must be created in order to maintain the assembly over the long haul? Occupy was completely parasitic on the “larger society” it was trying to secede from—or was it overthrow? Occupy was dependent on goods made in that larger society, monetary donations coming from that society, as well as on the expertise (medical, technical) that larger society, through its educational system, imparted to certain individuals.

An assembly, in other words, is not a society—and to claim that somehow it represents an alternative society seems to me disingenuous, extremely naïve. It is one thing to say that Occupy modeled modes of relationship that we wish could be more prevalent in our lives. It is quite another to claim Occupy modeled an alternative to mainstream society. To use Judith Butler’s terms, Occupy did not provide the grounds for a “livable life.”

But Gitlin and Butler both point us toward what seems to me a much more productive way to think about assembly. They both stress that democracy as a political form is deeply dependent upon assembly—and that the current assault on democracy from the right includes a serious impairment of rights to assembly. Vote suppression has gotten most of the press when it comes to attending to the ways that our plutocrats are trying to hold out against the popular will. But the anti-democratic forces are also determined to limit opportunities for assembly.

Let’s do the theory first. Democracy rests on the notion of popular sovereignty. In the last instance, political decisions in a democracy gain their legitimacy through their being products of the people legislating its own laws for itself (Kant). The fact that such things as a ban on assault rifles and increased taxes on the rich are (if the polls can be believed) supported by a large majority of Americans, but impossible to enact in our current political system, seems a good indicator that we do not live in a democracy—a fact with which most of the Republican party seems not only very comfortable with, but determined to sustain.

Because the final arbiter is supposed to be the popular will, there will always be a tension in democracy between the representative bodies of organized government and the people. That tension leads to repeated critiques of representative government and calls for “direct” or “participatory” democracy (dating all the way back to Rousseau). It also leads to the oft-repeated worry/claim that democracy only works on a small-scale. A large scale democracy (and what is the number here?; probably anything over 100,000 citizens or so) will inevitably depend on representatives to carry out its political business—and thus, in the eyes of direct democracy advocates, inevitably fail to be truly democratic. Elections are too infrequent—and not fine-grained enough (what, exactly, are the voters saying?) to provide sufficient popular input into specific decisions. Add the many ways in which elections are manipulated and you quickly get politicians who are only minimally accountable to the populations they supposedly represent. The electoral system is gamed to insure that position (office) and all its privileges and powers are retained by incumbents—or by the party currently in power.

How to make politicians accountable? One device is plebiscites, which have some kind of appeal. Let the people vote directly on matters of interest to them. The problem with plebiscites is that they are a favored tool of the right—and produce (in many cases at least) what is best called “illiberal democracy” or (to use Stuart Hall’s term) “authoritarian populism.” The blunt way to say this: never put rights to a vote.

Liberal democracy (or constitutional democracy) actually tries to place certain things (usually called “rights”) outside of normal democratic decision making, out of the give and take of ordinary political conflict/wrangling/compromise. Some things are held apart from the fray, are guaranteed as the rules of the game (basic procedures), as the lasting institutions (the court system, the legislature, the executive), and as the basic rights enjoyed by all citizens (civil liberties). The constitution also established the “checks and balances” of a liberal order—such that no particular person, office, or governmental institution possesses absolute power. Power is distributed among various sites of government in an attempt to forestall the ever present danger of its (power’s) abuse. The use of plebiscites is, thus, authoritarian, precisely because it bypasses this constitutional distribution of power through the appeal to the direct voice of the people—thus authorizing the executive to act irrespective of what the courts or legislature has to say.

SO: if one is committed to a liberal polity as well as to a democratic one, the notion of “direct democracy” is not very appealing. The “tyranny of the majority” is a serious concern—as my home state of North Carolina has repeatedly demonstrated throughout its history of Jim Crow and in its recent 61% vote in favor of an amendment to the state constitution against extending the legal protections of marriage to same-sex couples. In a liberal society, the popular will is to be checked, to be balanced by other sites of power, just as any other form of power is.

Of course, in any system, there comes to be a place where the buck stops. As critics of the Constitution—the anti-Federalists of the 1790 debates over ratification—pointed out from the start, the structure of the US government lodges that final power in the Supreme Court. That is why we are such a litigious society; the final arbiter is the Court—a fact that is deeply problematic, and which has led, in our current deeply polarized moment, to the Republicans resting their best hope for defeating the popular will on controlling, through the appointment of right-wing judges, the Court.

Some theorists of sovereignty insist that it can never be distributed, that it can only be exercised when it emanates from one site. Despite the outsized power of the Supreme Court in our system, I think it vastly overstates the case to say the Court is the sole site of power in our polity. Justifying that claim would lead me in another direction, one I won’t take up here. Suffice it to say that I favor a constitutional amendment that would limit Supreme Court judges (and probably all federal judges) to one 25 year term. That way we would be spared having our fates in the hands of 80 year olds (a true absurdity) as well as randomizing when a position on the Court came vacant in relation to which party controlled the Senate at that moment. The amendment would also state that the Senate must make its decision about the President’s nominee within six months—or forfeit its “advise and consent” powers if it fails to act in a timely fashion.

But: back to assembly. Butler, I think very usefully, suggests that assembly in a democracy is an incredibly important supplement to the legislature. Here’s the basic idea: the people’s representatives can, because of their relative freedom from direct accountability, do things that various segments of the population disagree with. The first amendment ties “assembly” to a right to petition the government. The text reads: “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging . . . the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Thus, assembly is tied to the notion of “the people” having another means, apart from the actions of its representatives, of expressing its opinions, desires, will—and that alternative means is expressly imagined as a way of expressing displeasure with the actions of the government. It is in the context of “grievances” that we can expect the people to assemble. In this way, the right to assemble can be seen as a partial remedy to the recognized ills of representation. The people, by assembling, embody (the terms here are Butler’s) democratic sovereignty and make it “appear” (utilizing Arendt’s notion of politics as the “space of appearances). After all, the will of the people (the ultimate ground of democracy) is invisible unless it takes the corporate form of assembly since even, as Benjamin Anderson’s notion of “imagined community” makes clear, an election is a virtual, not visible and actual, manifestation of the popular will.

Assembly, then, is democracy in action (note the Arendtian stress on action)—and would thus seem to be as essential (perhaps even more essential) to democracy than voting. It is when and where the demos comes into existence. It is democracy visible—and hence its deep appeal to contemporary writers from Hardt/Negri through to Butler, writers who are all appalled by democracy’s retreat in the face of technocratic, plutocratic neoliberalism.

Gitlin documents in the last chapter of his book all the various ways—starting with union busting and moving through the use of “permits” for demonstrations to keep demonstrators far away from the people they are demonstrating against to the criminalizing of assembly itself (as not “permitted” in the double sense of that word) to a closing down of public spaces to certain political uses—that the right to assembly is currently under assault, an assault that parallels the various efforts to curtail voting rights. Our overlords fear the assembled people—and are doing their best to erect obstacles to such assembly.

Thinking of the Chartists, I am also sorry that the nineteenth century connection of assembly to the presentation of petitions (a connection the first amendment also makes) seems to have been lost. All those virtual petitions each of us is asked to sign on line every day are pretty demonstrably useless. But what about 100,000 (or more) people marching to the Capitol and calling on the Senate Majority Leader to come out and take from the hands of the people a petition? Great political theater if nothing else—and a vivid demonstration of the collapse of democracy if that politician refuses (as I suspect would happen) to engage with the people he claims to serve. Face-to-face is much harder to ignore than what comes to you across the computer screen.

Still, and obviously, I don’t think assembly is the be-all and end-all of politics, for all the reasons I keep on banging on about. But Gitlin and Butler have made me much more attuned to the possibilities and resources that assembly can—and does—possess for a left wing politics.

“Good Enough”

In my last post, I said that liberals are believers in the “good enough,” in accepting the better in place of holding out for the best.

But I can only endorse that position with some serious qualifications. The first is that “good enough” is always contestable. That was the point of saying politics is endless. Political debate, deliberation, and conflict is often about what good the polity should be aiming to achieve. But, in other cases, the debate is about whether the extent to which we have reached a particular good is “good enough.” Could we do better? 80% of the population has health insurance. Should we be content with that level of achievement?

There will always be people who say we are not doing well enough. And such people are to be cherished. The “good enough” position asserts that any arrangement is imperfect. Under that condition there is much to be gained, and little to be lost, by encouraging those who point out how short of perfection we fall. Every halting point, every compromise, is unsatisfactory to some degree—and we hardly want to lose sight of the imperfections that mar every temporary arrangement/agreement.

We stand on muddy, messy ground here—and that is partly the point. Politics is messy because we never know for sure if different tactics will bring us closer to our goal—or if we have maximized what we can achieve. I am loath (allergic to) declaring imperfection inevitable. I hate appeals to “necessity” that seem designed to shut down utopian aspirations or radical critiques. Keeping the realm of possibility as open as possible seems, to me, essential to an imaginative progressive politics. To be called utopian should be an honorific, not a slur.

But—here’s the muddiness—some way of organizing things has to prevail in the imperfect meantime; we cannot leave everything entirely open, fully in flux, waiting upon the perfect. So political fights will also be about whether this current set of arrangements is “good enough” to accept for now, even as we acknowledge its falling short of the ideal. When, in other words, is “good enough” good enough? A very, very, very, difficult question to answer—and one that logic, reason, theory, philosophy cannot do much to help answer. We are here in the thick of the underdetermined world where “truth” has little or no role to play, the world that Arendt identified as quintessentially political.

Temperamentally, I find myself fairly often impatient with the perfectionists who refuse to sign on to an existing arrangement. I say, very likely unfairly, that they prefer their purity, prefer keeping their hands clean, to pitching in to do work required in the here and now. Keeping aloof becomes, all too easily, a permanent stance, a kind of ironic negation of anything that actually exists. It can, no doubt, be difficult to find anything to affirm in this sublunary world—that is, anything to affirm besides the ideals that would allow us to escape our sublunary condition.

But I guess—I never really thought of it this way before—I feel some kind of duty of affirmation. If one is, as I am, an absolute atheist, then there is nothing other than this world. And, yes, we humans have managed to fuck it up mightily. Still, that we have the power to fuck it up means we also should take at least some responsibility for it, for the ways it is arranged and unfolds. Ironic aloofness is one way of denying responsibility. It’s not my fault. I did no harm. But it is also a strategy for not making anything at all happen; I sit aside waiting for the arrival of a perfection that never comes, of a world that will live up to my standards. Good luck with that.

I prefer the route of saying “find something to affirm—and build out from there.” The great good things in my world are my family, my friends, my students, and my colleagues. With all of them I am able to have interactions that are life-affirming, that yield pleasure and insight, and provide opportunities for giving and receiving. From there, it makes sense to affirm (even reserving a right to criticize all their imperfections) the institutions and social arrangement that make those interactions possible. There are worldly settings for our relationships and it seems foolish to ignore or condemn those settings wholesale.

The liberal is often derided as a compromiser, as someone who muddles through, trying to have a little bit of this and a little bit of that, lacking a firm sense of contradiction. And the liberal is also seen as a Pollyanna, resolutely closely his eyes to injustices that undergird the social arrangements and institutions he proclaims “good enough.” But the liberal is not a conservative, not someone who is deeply committed to defending the status quo as the best we can do. And the liberal is not a reactionary, insisting that the golden age was somewhere in the past, and we must tear down the present to return to that prior era. The liberal is (in William James’s terms) a meliorist, forward-looking, in favor of improvement, always willing to measure our imperfect present against the ideals we espouse—and that we fall short of achieving. But the liberal refuses to condemn the present tout court and refuses to believe that absolute and violent repudiation of that present is likely to create even a better world than the present, no less a perfect one.

Again, to conclude, no theory or philosophy can guide us here. When is the status quo so unjust, so bad, that drastic action is justified to change it? When are more moderate strategies for improvement the better course? These are matters of judgment, and there is no determinative calculus to tell us which judgments are correct. Politics takes place on the field of judgment—and all we have to guide us are past instances, analogies and examples, and projective (imaginative) suppositions, none of which comes with any guarantees. Judgment, like social arrangements, are good and better, but rarely vault into the land of the “best.” We can only try to make our judgments “good enough.” Which means those judgments lead to tolerable decisions and actions, to doing things that introduce at least some improvement over the currently existing state of affairs. And then we count on “the cries of the wounded” (another phrase from William James) to let us know how the new arrangement still falls short.

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.