In Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly Judith Butler very slyly draws on speech act theory to suggest that “the political meanings enacted by demonstrations are not only those that are enacted by discourse, whether written or vocalized. Embodied actions of various kinds signify in ways that are, strictly speaking, neither discursive nor prediscursive.” To say that demonstrations have a performative character is eminently sensible, it’s patently obvious that they are meant to be noticed. Yet Butler’s deployment of the word “performative” is a little different than the standard usage and this difference is worth thinking about. J. L. Austin’s original formation of the performative in language in How to Do Things with Words begins by theorizing kinds of utterances which are not evaluable as true or false and for which the saying is part of doing a particular action. The classic example is a priest declaring, “I now pronounce you husband and wife,” the statement of which makes it so. By the end of the book Austin extends this analysis to declare that in fact all utterances have a performative character, that is, that they perform an action apart from (though often not unaligned with) their semantic value. When Butler suggests, then, that bodies coming together are performative, she asks us to consider the significance of this political act beyond the dimensions of what is being explicitly protested. This is question is particularly significant when dealing with protest methodologies like Japan’s ‘sound demonstrations,’ which lack explicit discursive meanings. What assembly performs for Butler, is, I would say, still in question. (As her title suggests, these are, after all, notes.) But she offers us a number of tantalizing thoughts as she asks to question the received primacy of political speech.

The neo-liberal moment ‘answers’ the problem of precarity with the discourse of personal responsibility. As Butler notes, this is deeply isolating. Such “responsibilization” transforms a condition of life that is the result of structural political and economic problems into unshared personal moral failings. Within the context of the precarious life, one of the things which embodied assembly performs is aa affirmation against this isolation. As Butler writes: “Over and against an increasingly individualized sense of anxiety and failure, public assembly embodies the insight that this is a social condition both shared and unjust, and that assembly enacts a provisional and plural form of coexistence that constitutes a distinct ethical and social alternative to ‘responsibilization’” (16). This is a significant gesture not only personally, but politically. Democratic forms of political legitimacy depend on the construction of ‘the people,’ which draws “a discursive border…somewhere, either traced along the lines of existing nation-states, racial or linguistic communities, or political affiliation” (5). This discursive border aligns in interesting ways with the tendency of neo-liberal capitalism toward designating “vulnerable populations,” “distribut[ing] vulnerability unequally” “for the purpose of shoring up certain regimes of power” (143). Butler demonstrates the violence of such a discursive move when she notes that “within the terms of booth military and economic policy, certain populations are effectively targeted as injurable (with impunity) or disposable” (143). It strikes me that responsibilization functions to justify the designation of the victims of precarity as vulnerable or even injurable, removing them from any connection to political legitimacy or action.

It is particularly fascinating in Butler’s analysis that vulnerability becomes a condition for and an object of assembly. Part of what occurs in assembly is a demand for access to infrastructure in and through which assembly takes place and from which vulnerable populations are excluded. More than this, assembly becomes a demand for space in which to live, the infrastructure that makes living (for Butler this signifies conditions beyond mere survival) possible. Butler argues “that part of what a body is…is its dependence on other bodies and networks of support…We cannot readily conceptualize the political meaning of the human body without understanding those relations in which it lives and thrives” (130). That very interrelatedness is a kind of vulnerability that is necessary to collective political action even as it becomes the goal of that action.

Anti-nuclear activism becomes an interesting test case for Butler’s work. The permeability of our bodies, our very interrelatedness with our environment, is the means through which radioactive contamination harms. Radiation itself seems to blow up the concept of vulnerability to extreme proportions—highly energized particles pass through and damage indefensible bodies. There is a way in which the threat of nuclear contamination seems to demand collective action. In Butler’s words, “to say that any of us are vulnerable beings is to mark our radical dependency not only on others, but on a sustaining and sustainable world” (150). The specific dangers of contamination threaten that dependency in a way that begs to be leveraged into political action. And yet vulnerability is distributed unevenly. In the case of radioactive contamination this is biological but also political and social. The triple disaster of 3/11 exacerbated for many what was already a precarious life. Vulnerability is one metric that helps inform the phenomenon of the Haha Rangers movement as depicted in Little Voices from Fukushima. The reproductive and social vulnerability of the mothers involved in the protest movement both necessitates and makes possible a collective coming together. If vulnerability is unequally distributed it seems that responsibilization is as well; the absence of men in Little Voices from Fukushima may in part be explained by Alexander James Brown’s interpretation of the work of Robin LeBlanc: “the gendered imagery of the heroic self-sacrificing salaryman” in Japan, he notes, “restricts the debate ‘between the polarising dangers of nuclear power and economic decline’” (63).  Thus, precarity is contorted in neo-liberal discourse to re-insist on the value of nuclear power. The threat of social isolation inherent in the discourse of responsibility becomes the means through which a destructive severing of ties between man and his environment is perpetuated.