The state that labor subjects find themselves where they have the right t ocontrol their lives, but have no actionable availability to do so.
“[...], dispossession is also akin to the Marxist concept of alienation, [...].” (6)
Alienation is important to the argument as an easily accessible analogy for the reader to relate to. The term is used to establish the nuances of Dispossession.
Alienation (Valentina Lopez-Cortes) (1) the process by which the oppressed & “othered” class is deprived of self identity, ownership, and freedom. (2) Alienation “works on two levels: laboring subjects are deprived of the ability to have control over their life, but they are also denied that consciousness of their subjugation as they are interpellated as subjects of inalienable freedom” (pg. 6) (3) I find this term, although originally from Marx, as succeeding in addressing aspects of deprived bodies, forces on self, and power over ownership all of which make up dispossessed people. Alienation establishes the rhetoric of the “other.”
“The Animal” (Sarah Edwards)
A being that maintains a place both within and beyond the human form, and is essential for understanding the interconnectedness of all forms of life.
“To pursue these questions it appears that we have to struggle against those versions of the human that assume the animal as its opposite and to instead propose a claim for human animality” (34).
The idea of the animal is essential for understating the human in its multifaceted form. When evaluating what defines the human, the animal is almost always disavowed so as to juxtapose the narrative of human dispossession.
Assigned Disposability (Sam Jacobson)
1. The process through which subjects, communities and populations are determined “unintelligible” and therefore “disposable” or of lesser value.
2. “I appreciate your conception of ‘assigned disposability,’ since it highlights this characteristic of neoliberal regimes to allocate disposability and precarity” (20).
3. In coming to understand assigned disposability, one can begin to see the inherent flaws in the framework of neoliberalism in which things and people become valuable only in relation to what they can provide for the market. This recognition in itself becomes enough to push back against a neoliberal method of operating, and to say that there are other ways of living, thinking or operating in this world which have meaning beyond their market value.
Aporia (Logan Miller)
An internal contradiction in a concept, definition, or phrase.
"In order to put this troubling concept to work - that is, in order to engage with the ways in which it gets us in trouble - we must confront an aporia." 1
This concept is important because these types of definitional paradoxes are everywhere, yet very difficult to pin down. Yet if one can be identified a much greater understanding of that particular concept can be attained.
Autochtony (Andy Monserud)
1. Autochthony is a social construction closely related to nationality and indigeneity, but distinct from each. “Autochthonous” persons are those assumed to “belong to” a land—in other words, to be its original owners.
2. “The idea that immigrants should ‘go back to their land’ (a refrain that has been used by racists in the United States against African-Americans who are told to return to Africa) suggests allegiance to the notion of the ‘autochthonous,’ which means belonging to the chthonic, or the earthly site.” (23)
3. Butler and Athanasiou point out that claims of autochthony back dispossessive movements from either side. Just as one can claim their own autochthony to dispossess perceived interlopers on what they consider their own, as one can see in rhetoric concerning immigration, one can also attribute autochthony to an other to relegate them to a particular location, as we have seen in our own history with the creation of Indian reservations. Ultimately, total autochthony is impossible and ridiculous to claim, and Butler and Athanasiou reject it as a tactic of exclusion and little else.
Dispossession: (Blake Ladenburg)
A complex state of existence where an individual is void of material condition, and as such is also at risk of losing more than material possessions.
"The second sense of dispossession is bound to the first. For if we are beings who can be deprived of place, livelihood, shelter, food, and protection, if we can lose our citizenship, our homes, and our rights, then we are fundamentally dependent on those powers that alternately sustain or deprive us, and that hold a certain power over our very survival." (4)
Understanding this complex and dual process allows us to understand how "we can only be disposed because we are already dispossessed." It helps us understand how dispossession exists as a process beyond simply being devoid of possession, and includes one's relation to non-material conditions such as security. It is this second aspect of dispossession that leads the disposed into a state of social precarity.
Economic Sphere (S. Quinn Lincoln)
A partition in the modern world’s orders of power that subscribes to purely economic realities.
“[...] and are invested in the production of a distinctive economic sphere.” (42)
In this section, they break down the “primacy of economics;” thus both authors attempt to examine what arranged the world into a system that perpetuates oppression under the Primacy of Economics.
Economy:(Blake Ladenburg)
A space and process in which subjects are utilized to create and alter other subjects
"I have no doubt that "economy"is today a diffuse, insidious, and powerful interpellation through which subjects (and non-subjects) are called into formation and reformation." (39)
The economy as a term is important to this work as it underlines the motivation of neoliberalism politics. When economics are being utilized to understand and dominate every other sphere of existence we must understand that the "economy" transcends the traditional marketplace, and is a term that explains the interactions of subjects in those other spheres. Thus helping explain how neoliberalism is a political rationality.
Hauntology (Logan Miller)
The state of disjunction in which the immediacy of presence is replaced by a spectre of past presences.
"I am interested in how hauntology (to recall again Derrida’s notion of haunting) might function as a critique of ontology. What possibilities for theory and practice might this shift open? How might we re-imagine performativity through this troubling of conventional categorizations of the ontological?" (17)
Hauntology implies that objects and movements can be informed by the past instead of being focused on the present. It perhaps shows that ideas are not truly new, as they are always informed by the past.
“The Human” (Sarah Edwards)
The culmination of multiple relationships and exposures which has historically been used as a means of upholding power.
“The human is always the event of its multiple exposures – both within its relatedness to others and within its exposure to the normative forces that arrange the social, political, and cultural matrices of humanness” (32).
In discussing the idea of the human, Butler and Athanasiou seek to complicate societal norms around the conceptualization of what is human and how it relates to dispossession. They draw these distinctions in order to provide a non-linear narrative of humanness that can be utilized in a number of different ways to understand mechanisms of power.
Oikos (Emma Dulaney)
One's finances in terms of private property and property ownership.
"the original meaning of 'economy': the allotment and management of the oikos (the house, the household) as the site par excellence of human capital," (12).
In order to maintain a sustainable oikos, people enter a state of "debt-fare" making them subjective to the capitalist, white, property owning male. This stress on property ownership as a means of control echoes New Urban Frontier via the process of gentrification leading to "debt-fare," while again addressing issues of racial and gender inequality as creating a class of dispossessed individuals (27).
Ontopology (Ione Fullerton)
Ontopology connects “being” with “place.”
“Taking cue from Derrida’s notion of ‘ontopology,’ which links the ontological value of being to a certain determined topos, locality, or territory, we might track the ways in which dispossession carries within it regulatory practices related to the conditions of situatedness, displacement, and emplacement, practices that produce and constrain human intelligibility” (18).
Athena Athanasiou utilizes ontopology to underscore her point that dispossession is marked onto bodies through both normative practices and through “situated practices of raciality, gender, sexuality, intimacy, able-bodiedness, economy, and citizenship” (18). This works to expand upon her “goals” on page 7, which complicates a notion of dispossession that depends upon possession and also demonstrate the political significance of dispossession.
Precarity (Nathan Gruenberg)
Marks those who undergo social death and are situated as non-beings.
In designtating the politically induced condition in which certain people and groups of people become differentially exposed to injury, violence, poverty, indebtedness, and death, “precarity” describes exactly the lives of those whose “proper place is non-being.” (AA, 19).
This is crucial because it marks how those that have presence can simultaneously make people have non-presence. It also marks how these concepts of social death and non-beings are necessary in constructing being. it poses the question, can the norm exist without the other?
Presence (Sam Jacobson)
1. The way in which an individual comes to understand themselves in the context of “bodily” and theoretical exposure to other people and situations outside ones control; becoming present is determined by ways in which external experiences interact with and are interpreted by an individual through the lenses of “self identity, self sufficiency and self transparency” which ultimately may result in the dispossession of their very presence (14).
2. “In becoming present to one another, as an occasion of being both bound up with subjugation and responsive and receptive to others, we may be positioned within and against the authoritative order of presence that produces and constrains the intelligibility of human or non-human presence” (15).
3. Understanding presence is important to our understanding of the means and consequences of dispossession. While there are ways to be present with one another and “not subsumed” by the process mentioned above, we must nonetheless not assume that “acts of agency, as effects of performativity” are “one’s own” (15).
Political Mobilization (Nick H)
1. The act of pushing back against the societal forces of dispossession and alienation.
"So if a certain kind of political mobilization, even one against land dispossession, is based on an idea of social interdependency, or on modes of ownership that sometimes seek recourse to sovereignty, this suggest that land reclamations work with and against traditional notions of sovereignty." 28
3. Butler highlights the importance of political mobilization because it encapsulates the resistance to dispossession through the means of social interdependence.
Possessive Individual(ism) (Andy Monserud)
1. The concept of the self and the body as property and their employment as such.
2. “It seems to me that MacPherson gave us an important genealogy of the production of the possessive individual, one which effectively claims that where there is no possession of property, there is no individual.” (7) “We need to object to forcible regimes of dispossession in contexts of liberal governmentality, where ‘owning’ always denotes ‘possessive individualism.’” (8)
3. Butler and Athanasiou cite the mindset of possessive individualism as contributing to a peculiar type of dispossession. If the person is a possession, they can therefore be dispossessed of themselves—and labor, especially slave labor (the dialectics of which they suggest created this concept) falls into this camp. As such, it is “a key concept of capitalism,” and Butler and Athanasiou agree to reject it in their critique, and they focus extensively in chapter 2 on creating an alternate conception of the human.
Self Identity (Nathan Gruenberg)
Necessary qualifier for presence. it is an attempt to be individual while simultaneously being outside classic histories and still being tied to genealogical burden of the metaphysics of presence.
I am not sure whether presence can be ever distinguished from, or divested of, the canonical metaphysical guises of self-identy and self-sufficiency once and for all. […] Self identity cares the genealogical burden of a metaphysical presence, but, at the same time, it is not determined by the burden of histories in which it has been entrenched (AA, 17).
This is a key term because it marks how difficult it is to conceptualize presence outside of it’s metaphysical and canonical metaphysical guises. It essentially marks the challenge in discussing these concepts.
Self-presence (Ione Fullerton)
1. When a self relates to itself, this is “self-presence.”
2. “‘Self-presence is an attachment to an injurious interpellation, which becomes the condition of possibility non-normative resignifcations of what matters as presence” (15).
3. The injurious interpellation described above is the “authoritative order of presence that produces and constrains the intelligibility […] presence” (15). Self-presence limits acts of resistance against these orders, because selves are capable of acting outside of these normative orders (but not when they relate to them as such).
"Trivial" Matters (Politically) (Emma Dulaney)
Issues of subjectivity due to the reproduction of Darwin's "biopolitical" hegemonic ideologies that are deemed "non-economic" by right politicians and therefore not worthy of being discussed or changed.
"I think that one of the formative effete of this incitation to economic reductionism is the dismissal of apparently non-economistic, or uneconomic, perspectives as being preoccupied with secondary, derivative, particularistic, inessential, and 'in the final analysis,' trivial matters and forms of politics," (42).
Ideologies of inequality materialize in the lack of political support to marginalized (culturally, economically, etc) individuals. Butler & Athanasiou call for no distinction between the political/unpolitical and the economic/uneconomic every sphere is interconnected and responsible for the precarious class.
Day 2 Chapter 4 (Sarah Edwards)
The activities of regulation and constitution come together to make gender and sexuality possible, but also are the preconditions for their ultimate emergence. Thus, ideals regarding gender and sexuality are always subject to some form of regulation (44).
While sexual orientation is often viewed through the lens of an involuntary action, Butler seeks to move away from this distinction to a more inclusive framework that reveals how these concepts of gender and sexuality operation within the nation state beyond this original binary (49).
In discussions of the phallus, there is a distinction between being and having that is important in distinguishing how sexual relations operate. Additionally, our interpretation of sexual organs can never truly be separated from the historical processes which saturated them to begin with. However, individuals still possess a sense of agency within this framework because they act to mediate the desires of the past and the future simultaneously (52/53).
Words/Phrases
“Regulatory constitution” (44/45)
“Sexual orientation” (47)
“Free expression” (48)
“Having versus not having the phallus” (49)
“Delimitation” (52)
“The nexus of temporal demands from the past and the future” (53)
Summary: This chapter engages in a discussion of gender and sexuality, delving into questions regarding the regulation of sexual orientation and what it means to “have” or “not have” a phallus. Butler ends with a conversation about the historical dimensions of our bodies that ultimately generate and sustain desire.
Chapter 4 (Andrew Durand)
Desire and the law are inextricably intertwined (45).
Sexuality is a form of possession caused by an initial object choice (47).
The Lacanian phallus cannot be directly possessed but instead exists as an imaginary relation (51).
Summary: This section engages questions of sexuality as a form of possession. This concept is problematized at the theoretical level during discussions of the Lacanian phallus. Further this concept is problematized at the material level during discussions of homonationalism and heteronationalism.
Chapter 4: Sexual dispossessions (Valentina Lopez-Cortes) quotes “We must make the division between a primary, productive and affirmative, power as constitutive of the subject and a secondary, regulatory or subordinating. power as external to the subject.” (46) “How can we comprehend the incitation to perform and conform beyond this perspective of chronological transition, which makes us assume a pre-discursive body and a primary intention of power as transtive and extrernal to a body” (50) terms materiality regulation consituative biopolitical performative identity outline imposing identity within the normalizing boundaries and binds sexuality and gender as defined through “having and being” breaking down of “sexual orientation” -distinction between act, practice, and identity What is sexual freedom? -“free expression” -there is a norm of what expression looks like, ergo freedom still is bound by the norms Dispossession -intertextuality leads to deflecting one cause in the name of another -example: homophobia in Palestine Sexual organs -pre-discursive materiality -framing materiality through norms and associations -“imagining bodies” -“having and being” (51) Morphing the body -desire influenced by power of identity -allowance to be different is normalized- freedom of expression is normalized -“release” is binding
Chapter 5 (Andrew Durand)
We are constantly being dispossessed by regulatory norms (55).
The idea of owning a gender is culturally specific (56).
The Daughters Seduction represents this idea of dispossession by constantly focusing on a loss (61)
The film recognizes the original loss by stating that the movie reaches its resolution through a process of becoming “ex-lovers” (63).
Summary: this section builds upon the work Butler accomplished in her early work The Psychic Life of Power. It is posited that there is an original loss who’s melancholic positivization constitutes sexual relations.
Keywords:
Dispossessed (55)
Unmanageable loss (61)
Chapter 6 (Andy Monserud)
Othered people, through self-recognition, can subvert and alter how identity is recognized (64-65).
The “self” does not exist on its own, or in a vacuum; it is a collection of “responsive dispositions” toward the social (71).
By asking “who are you?” one can either imply an answer (e.g. “it doesn’t matter” or “it is impossible to know”) or interrogate a relation (e.g. “how does the response justify your relation to my self?”) (73-74).
Summary: This chapter discusses the social nature of the creation of the self. Butler and Athanasiou establish a tentative definition of the “self” and point out the social pressures and resistances that shape it. Through a deconstruction of the question “who are you?” they put this multifaceted construction of the self into real terms—the question, to them, serves as a means of interrogating the self from both an external and internal perspective.
Key words:
Recognition/self-recognition (64)
Sovereign reflexivity (69)
Self-crafting (70)
“Who are you?” (73-74)
Chapter 6 (Andrew Durand)
Self-authoring can destabilize dialectics of recognition and challenge normative ideas of ‘self’ (65).
Self-making faces two struggles when dealing with the social. First, norms fought during self-making are inherently social. Second, we constitute ourselves with other people (67).
The self should reflect on its formation to engage a social that exceeds regulation and norms (70).
Summary: This section theorizes self the self. It is concluded that a level of reflexivity is needed in order to move beyond regulation. It is concluded that recognition as well as self-production are both political and ethical questions even though such a synthesis may prove concerning to many theorists.
This chapter is derived from their conversation on the limits and perils of recognition. It works from an understanding of dispossession as it encompasses ways subjects are prefomatively constituted and de-consituted by relations with those around us. Athanasiou summarizes: dispossession implies our relationally and binding to others,but also our structural dependence on social norms that we neither choose nor control (92).
Being disposed by the other is both a source of anxiety and a "chance to be moved." Subject's passionate attachment to regulatory powers is linked to the displacement (dispossession) of the self. Breaking those powers releases the attachment, and leads us potentially to self-poetics. (93)
Shedding self dispossession would require knowing practices or ways of recognizing self-diposession, but non-knowing places epistemic limits on knowing. As such could be deployed against those who are unaware. (94)
We are as individuals receptive and relational from the onset, and our drives depend on us being affected by others. Therefore we are engaged in "persecution" as the primary relation to others:we are not given choice at the beginning about will impress upon us. Developing the domains for radical impressionability and receptivity, which is not contained solely to infancy. Expands continuously through our life as part of a not fully articulate sensibility.(95-96)
Summary:
Recognizing dispossession through our relationality to others reveals how we are affected by self-dispossession, which forms as a result impressionability. Our impressionability occurs as a result of are lack of awareness to this process, and our continued lack of sensibility to know better.
In order to put this troubling concept to work – that is, in order to engage with the ways in which it gets us in trouble – we must confront an apori
Words/Phrases/Ideas
relationality and structural dependence (92)
passionate attachment (93)
self-sufficient "I" (93)
self-poetics (93)
"knowing" as a weapon/hindrance - "unknowingness" as a weapon/hindrance (94)
"persecution" as the primary relation to others (95)
radical impressionability and receptivity (95)
primary sensibility (96)
Chapter 8 (Quinn Lincoln)
Interesting intersection of other authors. Provided insight into Butlers’s arguments for this section. (93)
The distinction between knowledge as a weapon against violence versus understands that are materialized into conduct. (94) The notion of sensibility not being a possession but a mode of dispossession. (95)
Summary: The chapter discusses the relationship between interpersonal relations and dispossession. The authors make a note that the impact of others is a result of a lack of understanding as to the system of dispossession.
Keyterms Sensibility (95) Knowledge as a tool for action(94) cultural intelligibility (92)
Chapter 9 (Jenny Gruenberg)
Societal norms, which are currently being dictated by neoliberal governance, determine which bodies matter; which bodies can live and which bodies can die (97).
Essential truths do not exist; however, they still produce regulatory ideals and the power of normalization, yet no one can really embody them. We can fight for the right to be and to matter corporeally through the politics of performance, which allows us to claim rights of bodily integrity even if our bodies are never simply our own. Political struggle is grounded in identifying normative matrices that determine which lives count (98-99).
Performativity allow us to exercise the unauthorized right to existence, "which propels precarity into political life" (101).
Remake and rethink society based on ethical relations rather than the maxims and prescriptions of morality (103).
Summary: Societal norms dictate which bodies and people matter. However, the politics of performance allow individuals to claim rights of bodily integrity, even if their bodies are caught up in the larger controlling norms of society and do not truly belong to them. Performativity, understanding the agents of social control and activity working against them, is a way to bring precarity into political life.
Chapter 11 (Jenny Gruenberg)
Although norms “performatively produce and shape” individuals, there is always the possibility of resignification of the normalized order (127).
“The power of the law lies in its very openness, in its non-materialization” (127). The law is constantly changing and, therefore, is never firmly implemented. People who seek to access the law are in a constant state of presumption and anticipation (127-128).
“The truth of the law will remain forever inaccessible;” however, anticipation is only possible within life, so the end of life marks the end of anticipation for the truth of the law, which is a demonstration of negative messianism that fails to achieve a final realization (129). This allows for an open-ended reality to exist (130).
“Performative Surprise” (127)
Dialectics (127)
Law (127)
Perpetual presumption and anticipation (128)
Negative Messianism (128)
Open-ended reality (130)
Summary: Athanansiou and Butlers argue that because the law is open-ended, due to its ability to change and be re-implemented, reality is open-ended as well. Only death allows for the end of anticipation, which should allow us to embrace the uncertainty of the present and empower us to reshape and resignify the normalized order.
Chapter 12 (quinn Lincoln)
in response to violence of opressioon, the notion of naming/being-name had become a delemma; as, language in itself to capture atrocities, we are forced to find new ways of naming/being-named. (132)
Hegemonic discourse does not allow for representation of oppression and dispossession. (132)
change will arise because of the possibility of shifting speakability, even though language has failed us. (133)
difference between knowing every person destroyed, rather than achieveing a better understanding of the process of singularity (134).
a system of naming can further a course of dominion by oppressors as the identity relies on the wounds inflicted (135)
new modes of language should include a means for giving people separateness while providing community (136)
summary This chapter works to explore the nature of language’s impact of dispossession. The language of naming, specifically, is cited with regard to its goal (separateness as an invitation to community and its dangers (potential furthering of oppressing powers).
Butler and Athanasiou dissect the concept of language, underlining the fact that the process of naming can further dispossession and increase the sense of alienation among subjects.
“You have drawn attention, Judith, to the ways in which social norms determine what kinds of humanness can become possible, what forms of life become lovable and grievable.” (135)
“Self-naming is important, and we surely see this, for instance, when transgendered people struggle with what to name themselves.” (137)
“If we are always named by others, then the name signifies a certain dispossession from the stars. If we seek to name ourselves, it is still within a language that we never made. And if we ask to called by another name, we are in some ways dependent on those we petition to agree to our demand.” (138).
“Horrorism” (132)
“Representation” (132)
“Language” (133)
“Nameless/unnameable” (134)
“Social Norms” (135)
“Self-naming” (137)
Chapter 12(Logan Miller ) Summary Language becomes a restrictive barrier to discourse as by naming things we give them meaning and articulate ourselves around it. Yet a name may actually be something that is limiting discourse and hurting rather than helping.
The erasure of singularity is a crucial aspect of biopolitics (133)
Naming not only as a source of trauma but as a form of mimesis as well (139)
We are named by others, so we are already dispossessed in that way ( 138)
Singularity (133) Horrorism (132) Identity (134)
Chapter 13 (Sam Jacobson)
The political promise of the performative speaks to the idea of a physical action or “exercise of social agonism” that allows us “to bear witness to and at the same time disrupt the normative silencing of injurious national histories and disavowed losses” (142).
It is inherently connected to the ideas of political despair, dissent and street politics which takes form in many different instances and different countries as a way to combat a oppressive regimes and the inattentive or willfully injurious governments. It is also important to note that the performative fight takes place “overwhelmingly through bodily actions” (145).
The political performative should ultimately be conceptualized as a resistance to the practices of dispossession and disposability (148).
Words or phrases:
Political performitive (145)
Dissposability (146)
Bodily presence to the demand (143)
Anti-autocracy (145)
Conditions of precarity (148)
Summary:
The political promise of the performative is a powerful act. It is defined by a bodily action of protest which says “Stop. No more. No longer. We are going to remember this” etc. Most importantly it becomes an action which requires of its audience to reflect on what it means to be human, and on the conditions that has lead an individual to pursue the action that they currently engaged in. Chapter 13 highlights different acts of the political performative and how they operate to effect change in the contexts that we encounter them. From the Women in Black in Yugoslavia to the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi the authors point out how the political performative is an act of resistance against the conditions of disposability and precarity.
Chapter 14 (Sarah Edwards)
In this historical moment, “crisis” is directly related to the government’s ability to produce and manage truth in a relatively irrefutable way. Yet this form of “crisis” is particular to our current form of governance, so there has to have been a timeline of crises based on certain historical conditions (149).
Standing as a form of resistance counteracts the neoliberal and capitalist trend towards increased speed and production. Taking over public spaces adds another dimension to this resistance, because it resists against the privatization that is characteristic of neoliberal policies (150).
I think performativity is a really interesting concept because it contains the potential to suspend previous definitions surrounding the political and create new space for individuals to come to together. It also begs the question of whether or not political goals are ever attained, or if they are kept in constant suspension by a continuous performativity (155).
Summary: Chapter 14 examines the meaning of “crisis” in our current historical and political moment, and how that “crisis” is manipulated by existing power dynamics. It also discusses the ways in which forms of political resistance can counteract these structures of domination to forge new spaces and create dialogue beyond the existing framework.
Chapter 14 (Blake Ladenburg)
Crisis is utilized as a tool by the government to establish neoliberalism as the only rational and viable mode of government. In turn, discourses of crisis become a way to governmentally produce and manage crisis, rather than prevent their occurrence. As such crisis is turned into a rule and common sense that "renders critical thinking and acting redundant irrational, and ultimately unpatriotic" (149)
"Stasis creates both a space of reflection and a space for revolt, but also an affective comportment of standing and standpoint" (150-51)
"real democracy...prompts us to try to unravel the foreclosures on which the polis is constituted" (151). As such, we should work to deconstruct the formations and understandings of our current democracy, and allow for the implementation of democracy focused around inclusion.
It is important to note that this form of resistance results in a varied and diverse set of action and practice, and as such does not "emanate for a singular political logic, political formation, or identity. (151) As such, the movements "need to confirm the importance of alliances and cohabitation across established categorization of identity and difference" (154). These moments then sum up a "performative account of plural, contingent coalitional politics, whereby performativity is like with precarity." (155)
Summary: The chapter examines how crisis is utilized by government to subject individuals into submission to governmental authority, and the belief that There Is No Alternative to government order. It also provides a depiction of political resistance, which deconstructs the formation of our current understanding of democracy, and allows for the formation of plural, contingent coalition politics, where individuals are bound together not through uniformity, but through difference and precarity.
Words/Phases/Ideas
governmentally of crisis/TINA doctrine (149)
"real democracy" (151)
"preformativity of plurality" (155)
Chapter 15 (Jenny Gruenberg)
Butler works conceptualizes vulnerability in “a world in which collective means are found to protect bodily vulnerability without precisely eradicating it” (158). She believes that norms will help to build this reality when they are not static but instead are “collective sites of continuous political labor” (159).
Radically repoliticize belonging through Butler’s conception of norms. (159).
Butler acknowledges the basic human need for shelter; however, property ownership that is linked with individualism implies inequality. Instead, Butler puts forth the idea of entitlement to shelter on an “egalitarian basis” (160). The notion of hospitality complicates egalitarianism because a host/guest relationship implies an unequal power dynamic, yet the fact that we still think in these terms demonstrates that we’re coming form a set perspective. Butler proposes that the realization of an ideal may allow us to realize what is lacking in our current society and give us the motivation to change it.
The claiming impermeability while simultaneously waging wars implies knowledge of vulnerability yet attempting to mask it (163).
Summary: The understanding of vulnerability can be reconceptualized when norms are viewed as a continuous and ever-changing process. Additionally, conceptualizing what it would look like if an idea were realized can serve allow us to view our current society from a new lens and motivate us to achieve a new society where property is distributed in an egalitarian way as a basic human right.
Chapter 15 (Nick Hochfeld)
Summary:
Butler and Athanasiou call into question the relation between ownership and the owner or host of private property asserting the need for equitable property redistribution.
“We have to conceive of a set of alternatives to dispossession that do not reduce a property-owning individual to an ontological valorization.” (160)
“Here again I think we are considering the production of dispensable populations that has become the characteristic mark of neoliberal regimes.” (162)
“The augmentation of precarious populations rationalizes the expansion of securitatiran regimes.” (163)
15- Enacting another vulnerability (Ione Fullerton)
Butler works to reconceptualize the ontological ink between property ownership and individualism, which is tied to inequality. Rather, an egalitarian notion of “entitlement to shelter” dispossesses the ownership from the individual (160). A social framework can be set up that bridges the bodily requirement that makes shelter so necessary, and an egalitarian organization of social and political life.
Ethics of hospitality (161)
Developing a set of obligations (housing and livable shelters) that allow thinking of “we” as a people (162)
Realize the ideal, militate for the realization (162)
Precarity (163)
Chapter 16 (Nate Olson)
As neoliberalism expands, larger and larger social groups begin to experience precarity, but it is important to note that those who have long been experiencing precarity to belong to society, namely oppressed minorities.
Nation-states judge who is worthy and who is not to enter their borders, and this is frequently discriminatory.
Arbitrary discrimination a way to preserve legal and police power and maintain white hegemony
Immigration law is a form of bio political control.
The state has been expanding its power to determine who lives and who is allowed to die, as a way of controlling the structure and make-up of society.
Are states that attempt to erase memories of atrocities committed in the past any better than those who originally committed the atrocities?
The marks born by the body are a form of remembrance for actions committed to them before.
Phrases
Racial discrimination through precarity (164-165)
Migration policy (165-167)
State power as control over people (168)
Complicity through erasure (170)
The body as resistance (170-172)
Summary: This chapter is a discussion of state power over bodies, focusing on immigration law and performance protests.
16- Trans-border affective foreclosures and state racism (Ione Fullerton)
Racial regulations (anti-immigration laws) suspend or reject life. They are a form of biopolitical control and regulation that does not have to explicitly call for death, but certainly moves some towards it.
Zone of indifference between “banality” and “exception” makes up our biopolitical moment now, whereby the state can suspend the law and dispose of bodies in the name of life-affirming welfare. That is normative (168).
EU regulations as example (167)
Bodily life (and its abilities to experiences pain, pleasure etc.) now experiences socially induced suffering. For Athanasiou, this moment where the body’s suffering is banalized is pivotal in our understanding of present times. (168)
Galindo, bodily life, and its ability to suffer (or have suffering imposed on it) 170-171
Chapter 16 (Nick H)
Summary:
Immigration policy represents regulation over entire demographics of humans and is reminiscent of Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics ad disposable populations.
“What does it mean for a nation-state to judge, evaluate, valorize, and sanction the worth of certain gendered and affective enactments over others through its migration policy” (165)
“Perhaps we have to include immigration law as a form of biopolitical control and regulation.” (167)
“None of these concerns can remain political abstractions in the course of her performance.” (171)
Art interacts with the politics of grievability and memorialization in order to illustrate a simultaneous recognition of oppression and a resistance against it (173).
Different ways of remembering can be employed by different groups to reflect memory that is usually repressed or overlooked, and in this way remembering can be perceived as an active mode of resistance (174).
These actions can have both an individual and a social effect in reproducing both identities and communities (175).
Words/Phrases
“Grievability” (173)
“Memoro-politics” (174)
Plural performativity in relation to memorability (175)
Summary: This chapter recounts different artistic expressions that seek to take up the politics of memorialization and contest the prevailing narrative.
Chapter 17 (Nate Olson)
Memory politics (173-175): Promoting contemporary issues by making reference to past struggles and memorable moments.
Symbols memorializing silenced groups as a way to give them a voice.
Chapter Summary: This chapter discusses memorialization and performance art as political symbolism that gives a voice to silenced groups.
17-Public grievability (ione Fullerton)
Butler is interested in plural performativity. Both authors provide examples of a single action that is in the name of others, “lost and present.” Butler articulates the effects of this performativity—it articulates an individual and social voice, and produces a community of bodies that congregate on the street that can enact equality that counter hierarchical powers (175).
Papaconstantinou’s perfomative art both calls “acknowledges the forgotten dead” and those that currently experience a social death. This is a form of “re-membering” that challenged memoro-politics (174).
Galindo’s art worked to make “memorable” those killed did different kinds of work: it mourned, memorialized, and resisted at once (175).
Chapter 18 (Nate Olson)
How does the congregation of many different bodies in one plural performative moment affect the political.
Protests mobilize intense emotions, but this does not make them hysterical or misguided
By standing together in the face of state repression and acting freely, protests by multiple bodies symbolize the desire for political change.
Phrases
Bodies assembled in protest (176-178)
Plural bodies as resistance (178-183)
Summary: This chapter discusses bodily resistance and bodily freedom in the context of street protests and occupations.
Chapter 18 (Logan Miller)
Summary
How does bodily resistance to political structures change discourse? This chapter deals with collective performative action as a way to take back possession.
There is an aporia of solidarity which both hinders and enables collaborative action. The desire to exist and be free can never be exclusively ours but we need to struggle for it nonetheless.
The social movements of the present are faced with the challenge of building alliances that are formed on the basis of “ontology” rather through purchasing “their own claim to life by accepting and becoming part of the reproduction of the unlivable lives of others.
As the Palistinian Queers for BDS movement shows us, we must expand our effective alliances beyond claims of similitude and community.
Words or phrases:
Solidarity (184)
Space for dismantling the social conventions (185)
Social Movements (185)
Not a living contradiction (186)
Interdependency (187)
Summary:
As this chapter points out, we need to work to resolve the aporia of solidarity and to think about the ways in which different movements can come together and operate in the context of different (at times contradictory) agendas. Through the example of the PQBDS movement the authors make the case, there is a “radical insufficiency of social movements that purchase their own claim to a livable life accepting and becoming part of the reproduction of the unlivable lives of others (187).
Chapter 19 (Blake Ladenburg):
The aporia of solidarity confounds the understanding of freedom as a personal desire. As such it is necessary for the development of "concerted action," but also can be viewed as an obstacle to forming solidarity.
The point of solidarity is to make space for dismantling the social conventions and foreclosures that render some lives and desires impossible. We must restructure our understanding of social movements, so they don't "purchase their own claim to a livable life by accepting and becoming part of the reproduction of the unlivable lives of others." (187) We must expand our willingness to align with only those who are similar to us.
Summary:
This chapter examines how social movements are composed, and how to reconfigure our understanding of this movements in order to overcome certain obstacles posed by the aporia of solidarity. They posit that we must view social movements as a place to make space for the "dismantling of social conventions and foreclosures," a outcome only delivered through solidarity.
Words/Phrases/Ideas
"aporia of solidarity" (184)
ontology as a biopolitical demarcation of the scope of the human (185)
"radical transfiguration" (185)
"interdependency or equality" through "freedom or resistance" (185)
Chapter 19: Conundrums of solidarity (Valentina) quotes “Solidarity is unavoidably interwoven in the normative violence inherent in the what we come to imagine and recognize a viable life in accordance with given prerequisites of intelligibility” (185) terms aporia of solidarity intertextuality/ interdependence (“involvement of two frameworks of protest” 186) summary This chapter looks at how two oppressed bodies can depend on each other’s framework of to make a call for freedom and resistance.
Chapter 20 (Quinn Lincoln)
critical thinking skills is higher level education is a risk to corporate regimes (188).
Spectres of Marx still antagonize the capitalist regime take the form of student protests against university governance. (189)
There seems to be an increased possibility for universities to be specialized and privatized for marketable pursuits. Like a lofty trade school. (190)
in the US alone, there is an increasing number of academic works who have decreasing security. These teachers seem to be in the humanities (191).
summary: This chapter discusses the course of universities in the modern era. With questions like: “Who can afford to go?” and “Who can find entry into the halls?” Our authors discuss how educational institutions are being forced into a private market where teaching critical thinking is replaced by marketable skills.
key terms: Marketable skills (190) the notion of critical thinking and it’s place in society, how it's regarded and such. how universities are priming themselves for privatization (191)
Chapter 20 (Logan Miller) Summary This chapter discussed universities as they are changed from educational institutions to corporate ones. The emphasis on marketable skills rather than critical thinking is of particular concern.
The market seems to be the only measure of value ((190)
Universities reinforce already rigid class structures (191)
The loss of the humanities to other more marketable subjects (191)
Universities have always been places of power and inequality (189)
Book bloc (189) Bottom line efficiency (188) Rage (192)
Chapter 21 (Sam Jacobson)
“As we are affected by dispossession, the affect of dispossession is not quite our own” (193). The question becomes how do we reconcile and make sense of this in the context of also trying to understand how people are shaped by and react to the political realities of disposability.
There is a need to make sense of how “appearance relates to space, and taking space, and taking place when it comes to bodies in the street” (194). We are likewise confronted by the questions of who can appear and how certain appearances relates to those in other places, situations and countries.
Assembled bodies exercise a certain performative force in the public domain. This can be manifest in many different forms. “There are demonstrations without making demands” there are demonstrations “without explicit demands” (196). They “do not have to be organized from on high” or “need to have a single message” for “even if that body politic does not speak in a single voice” they still “form something of a body politic” (196). “The collective assembling of bodies is an exercise of the popular will, and in a way of asserting, in bodily form, one of the most basic presumptions of democracy, namely that political and public institutions are bound to represent the people, and to do so in ways that establish equality as a presupposition of social and political existence” (196).
Keywords:
Spaces of appearance (194)
Spacing appearance (194)
Taking place (194)
Body politic (196)
Performative force (196)
Collective resistance (197)
Summary:
This last chapter in a sense sums up the book and the political understanding of dispossession. When people and bodies fill the streets they form a “body politic” and exercise a form of democratic popular will (196). Performative acts are difficult and at times dangerous in themselves, but they are persistent, and in their insistence on collective equality and “thereness” they are able to organize themselves so as to become a “many voiced and unvoiced” defense of our “collective precarity” (197).
Alienation (Quinn Lincoln)
Alienation (Valentina Lopez-Cortes)
(1) the process by which the oppressed & “othered” class is deprived of self identity, ownership, and freedom.
(2) Alienation “works on two levels: laboring subjects are deprived of the ability to have control over their life, but they are also denied that consciousness of their subjugation as they are interpellated as subjects of inalienable freedom” (pg. 6)
(3) I find this term, although originally from Marx, as succeeding in addressing aspects of deprived bodies, forces on self, and power over ownership all of which make up dispossessed people. Alienation establishes the rhetoric of the “other.”
“The Animal” (Sarah Edwards)
Assigned Disposability (Sam Jacobson)
1. The process through which subjects, communities and populations are determined “unintelligible” and therefore “disposable” or of lesser value.
2. “I appreciate your conception of ‘assigned disposability,’ since it highlights this characteristic of neoliberal regimes to allocate disposability and precarity” (20).
3. In coming to understand assigned disposability, one can begin to see the inherent flaws in the framework of neoliberalism in which things and people become valuable only in relation to what they can provide for the market. This recognition in itself becomes enough to push back against a neoliberal method of operating, and to say that there are other ways of living, thinking or operating in this world which have meaning beyond their market value.
Aporia (Logan Miller)
- An internal contradiction in a concept, definition, or phrase.
- "In order to put this troubling concept to work - that is, in order to engage with the ways in which it gets us in trouble - we must confront an aporia." 1
- This concept is important because these types of definitional paradoxes are everywhere, yet very difficult to pin down. Yet if one can be identified a much greater understanding of that particular concept can be attained.
Autochtony (Andy Monserud)1. Autochthony is a social construction closely related to nationality and indigeneity, but distinct from each. “Autochthonous” persons are those assumed to “belong to” a land—in other words, to be its original owners.
2. “The idea that immigrants should ‘go back to their land’ (a refrain that has been used by racists in the United States against African-Americans who are told to return to Africa) suggests allegiance to the notion of the ‘autochthonous,’ which means belonging to the chthonic, or the earthly site.” (23)
3. Butler and Athanasiou point out that claims of autochthony back dispossessive movements from either side. Just as one can claim their own autochthony to dispossess perceived interlopers on what they consider their own, as one can see in rhetoric concerning immigration, one can also attribute autochthony to an other to relegate them to a particular location, as we have seen in our own history with the creation of Indian reservations. Ultimately, total autochthony is impossible and ridiculous to claim, and Butler and Athanasiou reject it as a tactic of exclusion and little else.
Dispossession: (Blake Ladenburg)
Economic Sphere (S. Quinn Lincoln)
Economy:(Blake Ladenburg)
Hauntology (Logan Miller)
“The Human” (Sarah Edwards)
Oikos (Emma Dulaney)
Ontopology (Ione Fullerton)
Precarity (Nathan Gruenberg)
Presence (Sam Jacobson)
1. The way in which an individual comes to understand themselves in the context of “bodily” and theoretical exposure to other people and situations outside ones control; becoming present is determined by ways in which external experiences interact with and are interpreted by an individual through the lenses of “self identity, self sufficiency and self transparency” which ultimately may result in the dispossession of their very presence (14).
2. “In becoming present to one another, as an occasion of being both bound up with subjugation and responsive and receptive to others, we may be positioned within and against the authoritative order of presence that produces and constrains the intelligibility of human or non-human presence” (15).
3. Understanding presence is important to our understanding of the means and consequences of dispossession. While there are ways to be present with one another and “not subsumed” by the process mentioned above, we must nonetheless not assume that “acts of agency, as effects of performativity” are “one’s own” (15).
Political Mobilization (Nick H)
1. The act of pushing back against the societal forces of dispossession and alienation.
"So if a certain kind of political mobilization, even one against land dispossession, is based on an idea of social interdependency, or on modes of ownership that sometimes seek recourse to sovereignty, this suggest that land reclamations work with and against traditional notions of sovereignty." 28
3. Butler highlights the importance of political mobilization because it encapsulates the resistance to dispossession through the means of social interdependence.
Possessive Individual(ism) (Andy Monserud)
1. The concept of the self and the body as property and their employment as such.
2. “It seems to me that MacPherson gave us an important genealogy of the production of the possessive individual, one which effectively claims that where there is no possession of property, there is no individual.” (7) “We need to object to forcible regimes of dispossession in contexts of liberal governmentality, where ‘owning’ always denotes ‘possessive individualism.’” (8)
3. Butler and Athanasiou cite the mindset of possessive individualism as contributing to a peculiar type of dispossession. If the person is a possession, they can therefore be dispossessed of themselves—and labor, especially slave labor (the dialectics of which they suggest created this concept) falls into this camp. As such, it is “a key concept of capitalism,” and Butler and Athanasiou agree to reject it in their critique, and they focus extensively in chapter 2 on creating an alternate conception of the human.
Self Identity (Nathan Gruenberg)
Self-presence (Ione Fullerton)
"Trivial" Matters (Politically) (Emma Dulaney)
Day 2
Chapter 4 (Sarah Edwards)
The activities of regulation and constitution come together to make gender and sexuality possible, but also are the preconditions for their ultimate emergence. Thus, ideals regarding gender and sexuality are always subject to some form of regulation (44).
While sexual orientation is often viewed through the lens of an involuntary action, Butler seeks to move away from this distinction to a more inclusive framework that reveals how these concepts of gender and sexuality operation within the nation state beyond this original binary (49).
In discussions of the phallus, there is a distinction between being and having that is important in distinguishing how sexual relations operate. Additionally, our interpretation of sexual organs can never truly be separated from the historical processes which saturated them to begin with. However, individuals still possess a sense of agency within this framework because they act to mediate the desires of the past and the future simultaneously (52/53).
Words/Phrases
“Regulatory constitution” (44/45)
“Sexual orientation” (47)
“Free expression” (48)
“Having versus not having the phallus” (49)
“Delimitation” (52)
“The nexus of temporal demands from the past and the future” (53)
Summary: This chapter engages in a discussion of gender and sexuality, delving into questions regarding the regulation of sexual orientation and what it means to “have” or “not have” a phallus. Butler ends with a conversation about the historical dimensions of our bodies that ultimately generate and sustain desire.
Chapter 4 (Andrew Durand)
Desire and the law are inextricably intertwined (45).
Sexuality is a form of possession caused by an initial object choice (47).
The Lacanian phallus cannot be directly possessed but instead exists as an imaginary relation (51).
Summary: This section engages questions of sexuality as a form of possession. This concept is problematized at the theoretical level during discussions of the Lacanian phallus. Further this concept is problematized at the material level during discussions of homonationalism and heteronationalism.
Keywords
Desire (45)
Biopolitical (47)
Homonationalism/heteronationalism (49)
Phallus (51)
Chapter 4: Sexual dispossessions (Valentina Lopez-Cortes)
quotes
“We must make the division between a primary, productive and affirmative, power as constitutive of the subject and a secondary, regulatory or subordinating. power as external to the subject.” (46)
“How can we comprehend the incitation to perform and conform beyond this perspective of chronological transition, which makes us assume a pre-discursive body and a primary intention of power as transtive and extrernal to a body” (50)
terms
materiality
regulation
consituative
biopolitical
performative identity
outline
imposing identity within the normalizing boundaries and binds
sexuality and gender as defined through “having and being”
breaking down of “sexual orientation”
-distinction between act, practice, and identity
What is sexual freedom?
-“free expression”
-there is a norm of what expression looks like, ergo freedom still is bound by the norms
Dispossession
-intertextuality leads to deflecting one cause in the name of another
-example: homophobia in Palestine
Sexual organs
-pre-discursive materiality
-framing materiality through norms and associations
-“imagining bodies”
-“having and being” (51)
Morphing the body
-desire influenced by power of identity
-allowance to be different is normalized- freedom of expression is normalized
-“release” is binding
Chapter 5 (Andrew Durand)
We are constantly being dispossessed by regulatory norms (55).
The idea of owning a gender is culturally specific (56).
The Daughters Seduction represents this idea of dispossession by constantly focusing on a loss (61)
The film recognizes the original loss by stating that the movie reaches its resolution through a process of becoming “ex-lovers” (63).
Summary: this section builds upon the work Butler accomplished in her early work The Psychic Life of Power. It is posited that there is an original loss who’s melancholic positivization constitutes sexual relations.
Keywords:
Dispossessed (55)
Unmanageable loss (61)
Chapter 6 (Andy Monserud)
Othered people, through self-recognition, can subvert and alter how identity is recognized (64-65).
The “self” does not exist on its own, or in a vacuum; it is a collection of “responsive dispositions” toward the social (71).
By asking “who are you?” one can either imply an answer (e.g. “it doesn’t matter” or “it is impossible to know”) or interrogate a relation (e.g. “how does the response justify your relation to my self?”) (73-74).
Summary: This chapter discusses the social nature of the creation of the self. Butler and Athanasiou establish a tentative definition of the “self” and point out the social pressures and resistances that shape it. Through a deconstruction of the question “who are you?” they put this multifaceted construction of the self into real terms—the question, to them, serves as a means of interrogating the self from both an external and internal perspective.
Key words:
Recognition/self-recognition (64)
Sovereign reflexivity (69)
Self-crafting (70)
“Who are you?” (73-74)
Chapter 6 (Andrew Durand)
Self-authoring can destabilize dialectics of recognition and challenge normative ideas of ‘self’ (65).
Self-making faces two struggles when dealing with the social. First, norms fought during self-making are inherently social. Second, we constitute ourselves with other people (67).
The self should reflect on its formation to engage a social that exceeds regulation and norms (70).
Summary: This section theorizes self the self. It is concluded that a level of reflexivity is needed in order to move beyond regulation. It is concluded that recognition as well as self-production are both political and ethical questions even though such a synthesis may prove concerning to many theorists.
Keywords
Recognition (64).
Self-poesis (67)
Norms (67)
Self (71)
Chapter 8: (Blake Ladenburg)
This chapter is derived from their conversation on the limits and perils of recognition. It works from an understanding of dispossession as it encompasses ways subjects are prefomatively constituted and de-consituted by relations with those around us. Athanasiou summarizes: dispossession implies our relationally and binding to others,but also our structural dependence on social norms that we neither choose nor control (92).
Being disposed by the other is both a source of anxiety and a "chance to be moved." Subject's passionate attachment to regulatory powers is linked to the displacement (dispossession) of the self. Breaking those powers releases the attachment, and leads us potentially to self-poetics. (93)
Shedding self dispossession would require knowing practices or ways of recognizing self-diposession, but non-knowing places epistemic limits on knowing. As such could be deployed against those who are unaware. (94)
We are as individuals receptive and relational from the onset, and our drives depend on us being affected by others. Therefore we are engaged in "persecution" as the primary relation to others:we are not given choice at the beginning about will impress upon us. Developing the domains for radical impressionability and receptivity, which is not contained solely to infancy. Expands continuously through our life as part of a not fully articulate sensibility.(95-96)
Summary:
Recognizing dispossession through our relationality to others reveals how we are affected by self-dispossession, which forms as a result impressionability. Our impressionability occurs as a result of are lack of awareness to this process, and our continued lack of sensibility to know better.
In order to put this troubling concept to work – that is, in order to engage with the ways in which it gets us in trouble – we must confront an apori
Words/Phrases/Ideas
relationality and structural dependence (92)
passionate attachment (93)
self-sufficient "I" (93)
self-poetics (93)
"knowing" as a weapon/hindrance - "unknowingness" as a weapon/hindrance (94)
"persecution" as the primary relation to others (95)
radical impressionability and receptivity (95)
primary sensibility (96)
Chapter 8 (Quinn Lincoln)
Interesting intersection of other authors. Provided insight into Butlers’s arguments for this section. (93)
The distinction between knowledge as a weapon against violence versus understands that are materialized into conduct. (94)
The notion of sensibility not being a possession but a mode of dispossession. (95)
Summary:
The chapter discusses the relationship between interpersonal relations and dispossession. The authors make a note that the impact of others is a result of a lack of understanding as to the system of dispossession.
Keyterms
Sensibility (95)
Knowledge as a tool for action(94)
cultural intelligibility (92)
Chapter 9 (Jenny Gruenberg)
Societal norms, which are currently being dictated by neoliberal governance, determine which bodies matter; which bodies can live and which bodies can die (97).
Essential truths do not exist; however, they still produce regulatory ideals and the power of normalization, yet no one can really embody them. We can fight for the right to be and to matter corporeally through the politics of performance, which allows us to claim rights of bodily integrity even if our bodies are never simply our own. Political struggle is grounded in identifying normative matrices that determine which lives count (98-99).
Performativity allow us to exercise the unauthorized right to existence, "which propels precarity into political life" (101).
Remake and rethink society based on ethical relations rather than the maxims and prescriptions of morality (103).
Corporeal Vulnerability (98)
Politics of Performativity (99)
“Count”/“Countability” (100)
Precarity (101)
“Responsibilization” (103)
Summary: Societal norms dictate which bodies and people matter. However, the politics of performance allow individuals to claim rights of bodily integrity, even if their bodies are caught up in the larger controlling norms of society and do not truly belong to them. Performativity, understanding the agents of social control and activity working against them, is a way to bring precarity into political life.
Chapter 11 (Jenny Gruenberg)
Although norms “performatively produce and shape” individuals, there is always the possibility of resignification of the normalized order (127).
“The power of the law lies in its very openness, in its non-materialization” (127). The law is constantly changing and, therefore, is never firmly implemented. People who seek to access the law are in a constant state of presumption and anticipation (127-128).
“The truth of the law will remain forever inaccessible;” however, anticipation is only possible within life, so the end of life marks the end of anticipation for the truth of the law, which is a demonstration of negative messianism that fails to achieve a final realization (129). This allows for an open-ended reality to exist (130).
“Performative Surprise” (127)
Dialectics (127)
Law (127)
Perpetual presumption and anticipation (128)
Negative Messianism (128)
Open-ended reality (130)
Summary: Athanansiou and Butlers argue that because the law is open-ended, due to its ability to change and be re-implemented, reality is open-ended as well. Only death allows for the end of anticipation, which should allow us to embrace the uncertainty of the present and empower us to reshape and resignify the normalized order.
Chapter 12 (quinn Lincoln)
in response to violence of opressioon, the notion of naming/being-name had become a delemma; as, language in itself to capture atrocities, we are forced to find new ways of naming/being-named. (132)
Hegemonic discourse does not allow for representation of oppression and dispossession. (132)
change will arise because of the possibility of shifting speakability, even though language has failed us. (133)
difference between knowing every person destroyed, rather than achieveing a better understanding of the process of singularity (134).
a system of naming can further a course of dominion by oppressors as the identity relies on the wounds inflicted (135)
new modes of language should include a means for giving people separateness while providing community (136)
summary
This chapter works to explore the nature of language’s impact of dispossession. The language of naming, specifically, is cited with regard to its goal (separateness as an invitation to community and its dangers (potential furthering of oppressing powers).
keywords:
performative politics (131)
“naming/being-named/hearing/being-heard” (132)
speakability (133)
singularity (134)
naming (137)
Chapter 12 (Nick H)
Summary:
Butler and Athanasiou dissect the concept of language, underlining the fact that the process of naming can further dispossession and increase the sense of alienation among subjects.
“You have drawn attention, Judith, to the ways in which social norms determine what kinds of humanness can become possible, what forms of life become lovable and grievable.” (135)
“Self-naming is important, and we surely see this, for instance, when transgendered people struggle with what to name themselves.” (137)
“If we are always named by others, then the name signifies a certain dispossession from the stars. If we seek to name ourselves, it is still within a language that we never made. And if we ask to called by another name, we are in some ways dependent on those we petition to agree to our demand.” (138).
“Horrorism” (132)
“Representation” (132)
“Language” (133)
“Nameless/unnameable” (134)
“Social Norms” (135)
“Self-naming” (137)
Chapter 12 (Logan Miller )
Summary
Language becomes a restrictive barrier to discourse as by naming things we give them meaning and articulate ourselves around it. Yet a name may actually be something that is limiting discourse and hurting rather than helping.
The erasure of singularity is a crucial aspect of biopolitics (133)
Naming not only as a source of trauma but as a form of mimesis as well (139)
We are named by others, so we are already dispossessed in that way ( 138)
Singularity (133)
Horrorism (132)
Identity (134)
Chapter 13 (Sam Jacobson)
The political promise of the performative speaks to the idea of a physical action or “exercise of social agonism” that allows us “to bear witness to and at the same time disrupt the normative silencing of injurious national histories and disavowed losses” (142).
It is inherently connected to the ideas of political despair, dissent and street politics which takes form in many different instances and different countries as a way to combat a oppressive regimes and the inattentive or willfully injurious governments. It is also important to note that the performative fight takes place “overwhelmingly through bodily actions” (145).
The political performative should ultimately be conceptualized as a resistance to the practices of dispossession and disposability (148).
Words or phrases:
Political performitive (145)
Dissposability (146)
Bodily presence to the demand (143)
Anti-autocracy (145)
Conditions of precarity (148)
Summary:
The political promise of the performative is a powerful act. It is defined by a bodily action of protest which says “Stop. No more. No longer. We are going to remember this” etc. Most importantly it becomes an action which requires of its audience to reflect on what it means to be human, and on the conditions that has lead an individual to pursue the action that they currently engaged in. Chapter 13 highlights different acts of the political performative and how they operate to effect change in the contexts that we encounter them. From the Women in Black in Yugoslavia to the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi the authors point out how the political performative is an act of resistance against the conditions of disposability and precarity.
Chapter 14 (Sarah Edwards)
In this historical moment, “crisis” is directly related to the government’s ability to produce and manage truth in a relatively irrefutable way. Yet this form of “crisis” is particular to our current form of governance, so there has to have been a timeline of crises based on certain historical conditions (149).
Standing as a form of resistance counteracts the neoliberal and capitalist trend towards increased speed and production. Taking over public spaces adds another dimension to this resistance, because it resists against the privatization that is characteristic of neoliberal policies (150).
I think performativity is a really interesting concept because it contains the potential to suspend previous definitions surrounding the political and create new space for individuals to come to together. It also begs the question of whether or not political goals are ever attained, or if they are kept in constant suspension by a continuous performativity (155).
Words/Phrases
“Crisis” (149)
“Neoliberalism” (149/150)
“Stasis” (150)
“Occupy Movement” (154)
“Performativity” (155)
Summary: Chapter 14 examines the meaning of “crisis” in our current historical and political moment, and how that “crisis” is manipulated by existing power dynamics. It also discusses the ways in which forms of political resistance can counteract these structures of domination to forge new spaces and create dialogue beyond the existing framework.
Chapter 14 (Blake Ladenburg)
Crisis is utilized as a tool by the government to establish neoliberalism as the only rational and viable mode of government. In turn, discourses of crisis become a way to governmentally produce and manage crisis, rather than prevent their occurrence. As such crisis is turned into a rule and common sense that "renders critical thinking and acting redundant irrational, and ultimately unpatriotic" (149)
"Stasis creates both a space of reflection and a space for revolt, but also an affective comportment of standing and standpoint" (150-51)
"real democracy...prompts us to try to unravel the foreclosures on which the polis is constituted" (151). As such, we should work to deconstruct the formations and understandings of our current democracy, and allow for the implementation of democracy focused around inclusion.
It is important to note that this form of resistance results in a varied and diverse set of action and practice, and as such does not "emanate for a singular political logic, political formation, or identity. (151) As such, the movements "need to confirm the importance of alliances and cohabitation across established categorization of identity and difference" (154). These moments then sum up a "performative account of plural, contingent coalitional politics, whereby performativity is like with precarity." (155)
Summary: The chapter examines how crisis is utilized by government to subject individuals into submission to governmental authority, and the belief that There Is No Alternative to government order. It also provides a depiction of political resistance, which deconstructs the formation of our current understanding of democracy, and allows for the formation of plural, contingent coalition politics, where individuals are bound together not through uniformity, but through difference and precarity.
Words/Phases/Ideas
governmentally of crisis/TINA doctrine (149)
"real democracy" (151)
"preformativity of plurality" (155)
Chapter 15 (Jenny Gruenberg)
Butler works conceptualizes vulnerability in “a world in which collective means are found to protect bodily vulnerability without precisely eradicating it” (158). She believes that norms will help to build this reality when they are not static but instead are “collective sites of continuous political labor” (159).
Radically repoliticize belonging through Butler’s conception of norms. (159).
Butler acknowledges the basic human need for shelter; however, property ownership that is linked with individualism implies inequality. Instead, Butler puts forth the idea of entitlement to shelter on an “egalitarian basis” (160). The notion of hospitality complicates egalitarianism because a host/guest relationship implies an unequal power dynamic, yet the fact that we still think in these terms demonstrates that we’re coming form a set perspective. Butler proposes that the realization of an ideal may allow us to realize what is lacking in our current society and give us the motivation to change it.
The claiming impermeability while simultaneously waging wars implies knowledge of vulnerability yet attempting to mask it (163).
Vulnerability (158)
“Belonging” (159)
Ontology (159, 160)
Property (160)
Individualism (160)
Hospitality (161)
“Impermeable” (163)
Summary: The understanding of vulnerability can be reconceptualized when norms are viewed as a continuous and ever-changing process. Additionally, conceptualizing what it would look like if an idea were realized can serve allow us to view our current society from a new lens and motivate us to achieve a new society where property is distributed in an egalitarian way as a basic human right.
Chapter 15 (Nick Hochfeld)
Summary:
Butler and Athanasiou call into question the relation between ownership and the owner or host of private property asserting the need for equitable property redistribution.
“We have to conceive of a set of alternatives to dispossession that do not reduce a property-owning individual to an ontological valorization.” (160)
“Here again I think we are considering the production of dispensable populations that has become the characteristic mark of neoliberal regimes.” (162)
“The augmentation of precarious populations rationalizes the expansion of securitatiran regimes.” (163)
"Vulnerability" (158)
"Ownership" (159)
"Hospitality" (162)
15- Enacting another vulnerability (Ione Fullerton)
Butler works to reconceptualize the ontological ink between property ownership and individualism, which is tied to inequality. Rather, an egalitarian notion of “entitlement to shelter” dispossesses the ownership from the individual (160). A social framework can be set up that bridges the bodily requirement that makes shelter so necessary, and an egalitarian organization of social and political life.
Ethics of hospitality (161)
Developing a set of obligations (housing and livable shelters) that allow thinking of “we” as a people (162)
Realize the ideal, militate for the realization (162)
Precarity (163)
Chapter 16 (Nate Olson)
As neoliberalism expands, larger and larger social groups begin to experience precarity, but it is important to note that those who have long been experiencing precarity to belong to society, namely oppressed minorities.
Nation-states judge who is worthy and who is not to enter their borders, and this is frequently discriminatory.
Arbitrary discrimination a way to preserve legal and police power and maintain white hegemony
Immigration law is a form of bio political control.
The state has been expanding its power to determine who lives and who is allowed to die, as a way of controlling the structure and make-up of society.
Are states that attempt to erase memories of atrocities committed in the past any better than those who originally committed the atrocities?
The marks born by the body are a form of remembrance for actions committed to them before.
Phrases
Racial discrimination through precarity (164-165)
Migration policy (165-167)
State power as control over people (168)
Complicity through erasure (170)
The body as resistance (170-172)
Summary: This chapter is a discussion of state power over bodies, focusing on immigration law and performance protests.
16- Trans-border affective foreclosures and state racism (Ione Fullerton)
Racial regulations (anti-immigration laws) suspend or reject life. They are a form of biopolitical control and regulation that does not have to explicitly call for death, but certainly moves some towards it.
Zone of indifference between “banality” and “exception” makes up our biopolitical moment now, whereby the state can suspend the law and dispose of bodies in the name of life-affirming welfare. That is normative (168).
EU regulations as example (167)
Bodily life (and its abilities to experiences pain, pleasure etc.) now experiences socially induced suffering. For Athanasiou, this moment where the body’s suffering is banalized is pivotal in our understanding of present times. (168)
Galindo, bodily life, and its ability to suffer (or have suffering imposed on it) 170-171
Chapter 16 (Nick H)
Summary:
Immigration policy represents regulation over entire demographics of humans and is reminiscent of Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics ad disposable populations.
“What does it mean for a nation-state to judge, evaluate, valorize, and sanction the worth of certain gendered and affective enactments over others through its migration policy” (165)
“Perhaps we have to include immigration law as a form of biopolitical control and regulation.” (167)
“None of these concerns can remain political abstractions in the course of her performance.” (171)
"Precarity" (164)
"Racial hegemony" (167)
"Slow death" (168)
Chapter 17 (Sarah Edwards)
Art interacts with the politics of grievability and memorialization in order to illustrate a simultaneous recognition of oppression and a resistance against it (173).
Different ways of remembering can be employed by different groups to reflect memory that is usually repressed or overlooked, and in this way remembering can be perceived as an active mode of resistance (174).
These actions can have both an individual and a social effect in reproducing both identities and communities (175).
Words/Phrases
“Grievability” (173)
“Memoro-politics” (174)
Plural performativity in relation to memorability (175)
Summary: This chapter recounts different artistic expressions that seek to take up the politics of memorialization and contest the prevailing narrative.
Chapter 17 (Nate Olson)
Memory politics (173-175): Promoting contemporary issues by making reference to past struggles and memorable moments.
Symbols memorializing silenced groups as a way to give them a voice.
Chapter Summary: This chapter discusses memorialization and performance art as political symbolism that gives a voice to silenced groups.
17-Public grievability (ione Fullerton)
Butler is interested in plural performativity. Both authors provide examples of a single action that is in the name of others, “lost and present.” Butler articulates the effects of this performativity—it articulates an individual and social voice, and produces a community of bodies that congregate on the street that can enact equality that counter hierarchical powers (175).
Papaconstantinou’s perfomative art both calls “acknowledges the forgotten dead” and those that currently experience a social death. This is a form of “re-membering” that challenged memoro-politics (174).
Galindo’s art worked to make “memorable” those killed did different kinds of work: it mourned, memorialized, and resisted at once (175).
Chapter 18 (Nate Olson)
How does the congregation of many different bodies in one plural performative moment affect the political.
Protests mobilize intense emotions, but this does not make them hysterical or misguided
By standing together in the face of state repression and acting freely, protests by multiple bodies symbolize the desire for political change.
Phrases
Bodies assembled in protest (176-178)
Plural bodies as resistance (178-183)
Summary: This chapter discusses bodily resistance and bodily freedom in the context of street protests and occupations.
Chapter 18 (Logan Miller)
Summary
How does bodily resistance to political structures change discourse? This chapter deals with collective performative action as a way to take back possession.
Political devaluing of passion (177)
The body as a performative tool (178)
Freedom is articulated in its exercise (182)
Survival (181)
Turbulent performative occasion (178)
Mutual vulnerability (177)
Chapter 19 (Sam Jacobson)
There is an aporia of solidarity which both hinders and enables collaborative action. The desire to exist and be free can never be exclusively ours but we need to struggle for it nonetheless.
The social movements of the present are faced with the challenge of building alliances that are formed on the basis of “ontology” rather through purchasing “their own claim to life by accepting and becoming part of the reproduction of the unlivable lives of others.
As the Palistinian Queers for BDS movement shows us, we must expand our effective alliances beyond claims of similitude and community.
Words or phrases:
Solidarity (184)
Space for dismantling the social conventions (185)
Social Movements (185)
Not a living contradiction (186)
Interdependency (187)
Summary:
As this chapter points out, we need to work to resolve the aporia of solidarity and to think about the ways in which different movements can come together and operate in the context of different (at times contradictory) agendas. Through the example of the PQBDS movement the authors make the case, there is a “radical insufficiency of social movements that purchase their own claim to a livable life accepting and becoming part of the reproduction of the unlivable lives of others (187).
Chapter 19 (Blake Ladenburg):
The aporia of solidarity confounds the understanding of freedom as a personal desire. As such it is necessary for the development of "concerted action," but also can be viewed as an obstacle to forming solidarity.
The point of solidarity is to make space for dismantling the social conventions and foreclosures that render some lives and desires impossible. We must restructure our understanding of social movements, so they don't "purchase their own claim to a livable life by accepting and becoming part of the reproduction of the unlivable lives of others." (187) We must expand our willingness to align with only those who are similar to us.
Summary:
This chapter examines how social movements are composed, and how to reconfigure our understanding of this movements in order to overcome certain obstacles posed by the aporia of solidarity. They posit that we must view social movements as a place to make space for the "dismantling of social conventions and foreclosures," a outcome only delivered through solidarity.
Words/Phrases/Ideas
"aporia of solidarity" (184)
ontology as a biopolitical demarcation of the scope of the human (185)
"radical transfiguration" (185)
"interdependency or equality" through "freedom or resistance" (185)
Chapter 19: Conundrums of solidarity (Valentina)
quotes
“Solidarity is unavoidably interwoven in the normative violence inherent in the what we come to imagine and recognize a viable life in accordance with given prerequisites of intelligibility” (185)
terms
aporia of solidarity
intertextuality/ interdependence (“involvement of two frameworks of protest” 186)
summary
This chapter looks at how two oppressed bodies can depend on each other’s framework of to make a call for freedom and resistance.
Chapter 20 (Quinn Lincoln)
critical thinking skills is higher level education is a risk to corporate regimes (188).
Spectres of Marx still antagonize the capitalist regime take the form of student protests against university governance. (189)
There seems to be an increased possibility for universities to be specialized and privatized for marketable pursuits. Like a lofty trade school. (190)
in the US alone, there is an increasing number of academic works who have decreasing security. These teachers seem to be in the humanities (191).
summary:
This chapter discusses the course of universities in the modern era. With questions like: “Who can afford to go?” and “Who can find entry into the halls?” Our authors discuss how educational institutions are being forced into a private market where teaching critical thinking is replaced by marketable skills.
key terms:
Marketable skills (190)
the notion of critical thinking and it’s place in society, how it's regarded and such.
how universities are priming themselves for privatization (191)
Chapter 20 (Logan Miller)
Summary
This chapter discussed universities as they are changed from educational institutions to corporate ones. The emphasis on marketable skills rather than critical thinking is of particular concern.
The market seems to be the only measure of value ((190)
Universities reinforce already rigid class structures (191)
The loss of the humanities to other more marketable subjects (191)
Universities have always been places of power and inequality (189)
Book bloc (189)
Bottom line efficiency (188)
Rage (192)
Chapter 21 (Sam Jacobson)
“As we are affected by dispossession, the affect of dispossession is not quite our own” (193). The question becomes how do we reconcile and make sense of this in the context of also trying to understand how people are shaped by and react to the political realities of disposability.
There is a need to make sense of how “appearance relates to space, and taking space, and taking place when it comes to bodies in the street” (194). We are likewise confronted by the questions of who can appear and how certain appearances relates to those in other places, situations and countries.
Assembled bodies exercise a certain performative force in the public domain. This can be manifest in many different forms. “There are demonstrations without making demands” there are demonstrations “without explicit demands” (196). They “do not have to be organized from on high” or “need to have a single message” for “even if that body politic does not speak in a single voice” they still “form something of a body politic” (196). “The collective assembling of bodies is an exercise of the popular will, and in a way of asserting, in bodily form, one of the most basic presumptions of democracy, namely that political and public institutions are bound to represent the people, and to do so in ways that establish equality as a presupposition of social and political existence” (196).
Keywords:
Spaces of appearance (194)
Spacing appearance (194)
Taking place (194)
Body politic (196)
Performative force (196)
Collective resistance (197)
Summary:
This last chapter in a sense sums up the book and the political understanding of dispossession. When people and bodies fill the streets they form a “body politic” and exercise a form of democratic popular will (196). Performative acts are difficult and at times dangerous in themselves, but they are persistent, and in their insistence on collective equality and “thereness” they are able to organize themselves so as to become a “many voiced and unvoiced” defense of our “collective precarity” (197).