I always appreciate the opportunity to read Judith Butler’s work because there is such a depth to her writing. The chapters from her recent Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly that we read for the course is one that I had not read before and am glad to have. It has helped me flesh out some theoretical issues that have been at play in my own work and shaped my thinking around the role of the humanities within the larger scope of environmental action.
At the forefront of Butler’s argument is precarity, that is, existing within the system of neoliberal capitalism wherein our bodies and identities are caught up in our ability to produce some kind of economic value. This reduction makes the exigence of much academic work focused on results that generate capital, draw investors or grants, and help market the university or department where the work is done. This model is something I think we all feel on some level, some more than others. But, in the humanities, the drive toward marketability has in recent years grown louder and louder.
This is where I feel Butler’s intervention most dearly. When she writes that, “My increasing urgent sense about speaking in public, or writing for a public, is not that it should lead us straightway to a path for action; it is, rather, a chance to pause together and reflect on the conditions and directions of acting, a form of reflecting that has its own value, and not merely an instrumental one” (124). Doing for the sake of doing or rather, critical inquiry for the sake of education, something which the humanities as a discipline took as foundational for years seems under pressure to change into a more market driven approach to knowledge production. I think this formulation can be of use in thinking about the power of the humanities and its role within global disasters. The STEM programs are not the only ones with answers to these problems.
While, “just doing something” even if it doesn’t create any discernable change may seem like a futile attempt to participate, I think Butler wants us to think about this kind of action on a deeper level of what such action can evoke in those who are a part of it—that is, what can it helps us realize about ourselves and our communities? She writes, “What does it mean to at together when the conditions for acting together are devastated or falling away? Such an impasse can become the paradoxical condition of a form of social solidarity both mournful and joyful, a gathering enacted by bodies under duress or in the name of duress, where the gathering itself signifies persistence and resistance” (123).
What she calls “Vulnerability as a form of activism” is probably the most impactful idea that I learned from this course (123). Care and vulnerability already shape a lot of my work, especially in how we think of our relationships with the nonhuman world. But also in my interest in contemporary fiction and what some are calling a turn away from post-modern irony toward a kind of “new sincerity”. This movement is shaped by a desire to be engaged with genuine feelings without needing to create ironic distance between the self and the object of attention while at the same time not relinquishing the self-awareness and self-referential power of the post-modern. Such a discourse benefits from Butler’s notion of vulnerability as activism because it helps to inject a politics into the otherwise aesthetically focused concept of sincerity. To be vulnerable together—to care together—about the things we like and about the things we hold dear, (our political identities and our collective interests among them), is a way to embrace the precarity of our lives and find empowerment because of it. The importance of care and vulnerability, touch on nearly all of the major topics in the environmental humanities that we covered this semester. From precarity (which Butler also helps us theorize) to an openness to the agency of the material world beyond the human that Bennett asks us to embrace, there lies a push to recognize the already vulnerable nature of our existence. To think that we are not already vulnerable is delusion. The only way forward in terms of reconciling human impact on the planet and what we can do about it while entrenched in a system that complicates and perverts collective action, is through an embrace of that vulnerability.
