Dispossession

The Performative in the Political

Judith Butler, Athena Athanasiou

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745664354
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Dispossession describes the condition of those who have lost land, citizenship, property, and a broader belonging to the world. This thought-provoking book seeks to elaborate our understanding of dispossession outside of the conventional logic of possession, a hallmark of capitalism, liberalism, and humanism. Can dispossession simultaneously characterize political responses and opposition to the disenfranchisement associated with unjust dispossession of land, economic and political power, and basic conditions for living? In the context of neoliberal expropriation of labor and livelihood, dispossession opens up a performative condition of being both affected by injustice and prompted to act. From the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa to the anti-neoliberal gatherings at Puerta del Sol, Syntagma and Zucchotti Park, an alternative political and affective economy of bodies in public is being formed. Bodies on the street are precarious - exposed to police force, they are also standing for, and opposing, their dispossession. These bodies insist upon their collective standing, organize themselves without and against hierarchy, and refuse to become disposable: they demand regard. This book interrogates the agonistic and open-ended corporeality and conviviality of the crowd as it assembles in cities to protest political and economic dispossession through a performative dispossession of the sovereign subject and its propriety.

1

Aporetic dispossession, or the trouble with dispossession

AA: Dispossession is a troubling concept. It is so troubling that as we seek to write about it, it is highly possible that it gets us into trouble. 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. On the one side, dispossession signifies an inaugural submission of the subject-to-be to norms of intelligibility, a submission which, in its paradoxical simultaneity with mastery, constitutes the ambivalent and tenuous processes of subjection. It thus resonates with the psychic foreclosures that determine which “passionate attachments” are possible and plausible for “one” to become a subject. In this sense, dispossession encompasses the constituted, preemptive losses that condition one’s being dispossessed (or letting oneself become dispossessed) by another: one is moved to the other and by the other – exposed to and affected by the other’s vulnerability. The subject comes to “exist” by installing within itself lost objects along with the social norms that regulate the subject’s disposition to the address of the other. On the other side (the extent to which this side can be assumed as “other” will have to remain in suspension for a while), being dispossessed refers to processes and ideologies by which persons are disowned and abjected by normative and normalizing powers that define cultural intelligibility and that regulate the distribution of vulnerability: loss of land and community; ownership of one’s living body by another person, as in histories of slavery; subjection to military, imperial, and economic violence; poverty, securitarian regimes, biopolitical subjectivation, liberal possessive individualism, neoliberal governmentality, and precaritization.

If in the first sense dispossession stands as a heteronomic condition for autonomy, or, perhaps more accurately, as a limit to the autonomous and impermeable self-sufficiency of the liberal subject through its injurious yet enabling fundamental dependency and relationality, in the second sense dispossession implies imposed injuries, painful interpellations, occlusions, and foreclosures, modes of subjugation that call to be addressed and redressed. In the first sense, avowing the trace of primary passions and losses – as one’s psychic and social attachment to the law that determines one’s disposition to alterity – is a necessary condition of the subject’s survival; in the second sense, dispossession is a condition painfully imposed by the normative and normalizing violence that determines the terms of subjectivity, survival, and livability. In both senses, dispossession involves the subject’s relation to norms, its mode of becoming by means of assuming and resignifying injurious interpellations and impossible passions. The task here, a task of gesturing to the performative in the political, is to weave the two valences of dispossession together and to perform this interweaving of the two valences beyond and counter to the logic of numeration and calculability; rather than ordering attributes into a coherent and fixed sequence, then, we should gesture to what resists assimilation into the framework of dispossession.

JB: It is true that dispossession carries this double valence and that as a result it is difficult to understand until we see that we value it in one of its modalities and abhor and resist it in another. As you say, dispossession can be a term that marks the limits of self-sufficiency and that establishes us as relational and interdependent beings. Yet dispossession is precisely what happens when populations lose their land, their citizenship, their means of livelihood, and become subject to military and legal violence. We oppose this latter form of dispossession because it is both forcible and privative. In the first sense, we are dispossessed of ourselves by virtue of some kind of contact with another, by virtue of being moved and even surprised or disconcerted by that encounter with alterity. The experience itself is not simply episodic, but can and does reveal one basis of relationality – we do not simply move ourselves, but are ourselves moved by what is outside us, by others, but also by whatever “outside” resides in us. For instance, we are moved by others in ways that disconcert, displace, and dispossess us; we sometimes no longer know precisely who we are, or by what we are driven, after contact with some other or some other group, or as a result of someone else’s actions. One can be dispossessed in grief or in passion – unable to find oneself. Much of Greek tragedy relies on this undoing of self-sufficient forms of deliberation, the dispossessions of grief, love, rage, ambition, ecstasy. These forms of experience call into question whether we are, as bounded and deliberate individuals, self-propelling and self-driven. Indeed, they suggest that we are moved by various forces that precede and exceed our deliberate and bounded selfhood. As such, we cannot understand ourselves without in some ways giving up on the notion that the self is the ground and cause of its own experience. A number of postulates follow: we can say that dispossession establishes the self as social, as passionate, that is, as driven by passions it cannot fully consciously ground or know, as dependent on environments and others who sustain and even motivate the life of the self itself.

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. Even when we have our rights, we are dependent on a mode of governance and a legal regime that confers and sustains those rights. And so we are already outside of ourselves before any possibility of being dispossessed of our rights, land, and modes of belonging. In other words, we are interdependent beings whose pleasure and suffering depend from the start on a sustained social world, a sustaining environment. This does not mean that everyone is born into a sustaining world. Not at all. But when someone is born into malnutrition or physical exposure or some other condition of extreme precarity, we see precisely how the deprivation of that sustaining world can and does thwart or vanquish a life. So every life is in this sense outside itself from the start, and its “dispossession” in the forcible or privative sense can only be understood against that background. We can only be dispossessed because we are already dispossessed. Our interdependency establishes our vulnerability to social forms of deprivation.

AA: I agree with you that “we can only be dispossessed because we are already dispossessed,” as you put it, but I am also hesitating. My sense is that language may fail us here insofar as such a formulation contrives to establish a causal link between “being” dispossessed, on the one side, and “becoming” or “being made” dispossessed, on the other. Although the two senses of dispossession are bound to each other, there is no ontological, causal, or chronological link between “being dispossessed” (as a primordial disposition to relationality that lies at a fundamental level of subjection and signals a constitutive self-displacement, that is, the constitution of the subject through certain kinds of foreclosure and preemptive loss) and “becoming dispossessed” (as an ensuing, derivative condition of enforced deprivation of land, rights, livelihood, desire, or modes of belonging). We should be wary of conflating or ontologically demarcating these nuances of dispossession. In fact, one of our efforts in this intervention ought to be to seek to denaturalize and repoliticize the ways in which “being always already dispossessed” is often summoned to legitimize an abdication of political responsibility for social forms of deprivation and dispossession.

There is a very complicated affective, psychic, and political dynamic involved in the multiple nuances of “becoming dispossessed,” one that takes us to the multilayered traumas of subjection and the foreclosures that structure our “passionate attachments,” the foreclosures that produce melancholia in determining which passionate attachments are possible and viable, and which are not (for instance the disavowal of same-sex desire). How do we think these two modes of dispossession together? Moreover, how does this double valence of dispossession relate violent foreclosures of gender and sexuality with convergent troubling issues of our time such as statelessness, racism, poverty, xenophobia, and ensuing modalities of exposure to violence and recourse to rights?

The notion of dispossession, in all its intractable ways of signaling the contemporary production of social discourses, modes of power, and subjects, is a theoretical trope that might help us begin to address the fact that dis-possession carries the presumption that someone has been deprived of something that rightfully belongs to them. In this sense, dispossession is also akin to the Marxist concept of alienation, which works on two levels: laboring subjects are deprived of the ability to have control over their life, but they are also denied the consciousness of their subjugation as they are interpellated as subjects of inalienable freedom. At the same time, it is equally important to think about dispossession as a condition that is not simply countered by appropriation, a term that re-establishes possession and property as the primary prerogatives of self-authoring personhood. The challenge that we face here, and it is a simultaneously ethical, political, and theoretical challenge, is double. Firstly, we must elaborate on how to think about dispossession outside of the logic of possession (as a hallmark of modernity, liberalism, and humanism), that is, not only avoiding but also calling into question the exclusionary calculus of proprietariness in late liberal forms of power; and, secondly, we must elaborate why this reflective gesture is politically significant.

JB: Yes, and to this end, we might wonder why certain forms of human deprivation and exploitation are called “dispossession.” Was there a property that was first owned and then was stolen? Sometimes, yes. Yet, what do we make of the idea that we have property in our own persons? Are persons forms of property, and would we be able to understand this legal formulation at all if it were not for the historical conditions of slavery and those forms of possessive individualism that belong to capitalism? 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.¹ So I see us as working against this key construct of capitalism at the same time as we object to forms of land theft and territorial dispossession. This leads me to wonder whether we can find ethical and political ways of objecting to forcible and coercive dispossession that do not depend upon a valorization of possessive individualism.

AA: Exactly. This is a question that reflects our attempt to critically engage with the various discursive, subjective, institutional, and affective formations of late liberal reason in national and global contexts. It is in this perspective that we must focus on discursive and performative regimes of dispossession as well as on critical responses to them. And it is in this perspective that we need to object to forcible regimes of dispossession in contexts of liberal governmentality, where “owning” always denotes “possessive individualism.”

JB: Those forms of moral philosophy that ground their objections to land theft on the rights of the individual to property very often deflect from the colonial conditions, for instance, under which property is systematically confiscated. Indeed, one would not be able to understand or even object to property theft in Israel/Palestine without understanding the function of the confiscation of Palestinian lands since 1948 as part of settler colonialism and the founding of the nation-state on principles of Jewish sovereignty. So though in every instance of land confiscation a person’s land was taken, and that “person” remains a singular and irreducible one, it is equally true that everyone who lost her or his lands through these forcible means (750,000 in 1948 alone) is implicated in processes of colonization and state formation. In other words, we cannot understand what happens to an individual’s land if we do not understand both the social form of property and the social form of individuality.

Those who ground their objections on the basis of the claims of possessive individualism tend to argue that an individual owns land by virtue of laboring on it, or by virtue of a contract that compels recognition of that claim of ownership. In the early years of Zionism, it was clear that Jews invoked Lockean principles to claim that because they worked the land and established irrigation networks, this laboring activity implied rights of ownership, even rights of national belonging grounded on territory. We can see how, in fact, the aims of both the nation and the colony depended upon an ideology of possessive individualism that was recast as possessive nationalism.

In Palestine, deeds to property and explicit legal contracts were regularly disregarded in the name of national interest. Similarly, the labor theory of value was actually invoked by Zionists to counter claims of existing contracts and deeds. So the question is not whether possessive individualism is a good or a bad ontology; rather, the question is how it works, and in the service of what sorts of political aims. If we question the “desire to possess” as a natural property of individuals, then we can, as MacPherson does, begin to ask the historical question of how the desire to possess property on an individual basis was produced over time as a natural, if not essential, characteristic of human personhood, and for what purposes. From a philosophical point of view, we can then ask, as well, whether this production of possessive individualism depended upon a disavowal of more primary social, dependent, and relational modes of existence. In the case of Palestine, we can ask how systematic land confiscation undermines the legal and economic conditions of cohabitation. In this sense, the privative form of dispossession makes the relational form of dispossession impossible. I think this comes close to what you mean, Athena, by the heteronomic condition of autonomy.

Note

1 C. B. MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962).

2

The logic of dispossession and the matter of the human (after the critique of metaphysics of substance)

AA: In general, dispossession speaks to how human bodies become materialized and de-materialized through histories of slavery, colonization, apartheid, capitalist alienation, immigration and asylum politics, postcolonial liberal multiculturalism, gender and sexual normativity, securitarian governmentality, and humanitarian reason.

It might be helpful to consider that in the proper sense of the word, if such a thing exists, “dispossession” originally referred to practices of land encroachment. Colonial and racist assumptions have been historically mobilized to justify and naturalize the misrecognition, appropriation, and occupation of indigenous lands in colonial and postcolonial settler contexts – such as in the case of the dispossession of indigenous people and the occupation of Palestinian lands and resources by the Israeli state. In such contexts, either by means of national monoculturalism, liberal multicultural (mis)recognition, biopiracy, and reification of “cultural diversity,” or apartheid, such as the separation wall in Palestine, dispossession works as an authoritative and often paternalistic apparatus of controlling and appropriating the spatiality, mobility, affectivity, potentiality, and relationality of (neo-)colonized subjects. In such contexts, “dispossession” offers language to express experiences of uprootedness, occupation, destruction of homes and social bonds, incitation to “authentic” self-identities, humanitarian victimization, unlivability, and struggles for self-determination.¹

The formation of prevailing assumptions about what constitutes land as colonial settler space, sovereign nation-state territory, or bourgeois private property lies at the heart of the history of western modern human subjectivity. In today’s global market economy of neoliberal capitalism and “debtocracy,”² dispossession signifies the violent appropriation of labor and the wearing out of laboring and non-laboring bodies. This has manifested in the current politics of economic precarity in the form of temporary, low-paying, and insecure jobs, in combination with cuts to welfare provision and expropriation of public education and health institutions. International financial institutions prescribe to indebted countries measures of austerity (such as cutting public expenditures) as prerequisites for loans. Through neoliberal austerity measures, the governments of European nation-states protect market sovereignty and banks while attacking the lowest-paid workers, the unemployed, the urban poor, and the impoverished urban middle classes. Common, collective, and public assets are converted into private property rights. This redistributive politics is relevant to what David Harvey has described as the neoliberal drive toward “accumulation by dispossession.”³ In neoliberal frames of privatization, financialization, and management of crises, jobs are being taken away, hopes are obliterated, and bodies are instrumentalized and worn out. But new life forms and forms of subjectivity are also being produced (that is, human life turned into capital), as “debt” becomes a fundamental technology of biopolitical governmentality – a political and moral economy of life itself. This is, in fact, the original meaning of “economy”: the allotment and management of the oikos (the house, the household) as the site par excellence of human capital. This etymology is very suggestive of the current shift taking place in the domain of power, from the rule of law and the production of the ordinary to measures of crisis-management and therapeutic decrees of emergency (which, in turn, inculcate another order of ordinariness).

In such contexts of knowledge, power, and subjectivity, it is worth rethinking democracy, citizenship, and collective agency by means of developing new political strategies that engage the dispossession of indebtedness as a crucial moment in the histories of liberal western governmentality. Land and property ownership has surely been at the heart of the onto-epistemologies of subject formation in the histories of the western, white, male, colonizing, capitalist, property-owning, sovereign human subject. In the political imaginary of (post)colonial capitalist western modernity and its claims of universal humanity, being and having are constituted as ontologically akin to each other; being is defined as having; having is constructed as an essential prerequisite of proper human being.⁴ Also, the definition of the ownership of one’s body as property is a founding moment of liberalism. However, certain bodies – paradigmatically so the bodies of slaves – are excluded from this classic definition of the biopolitical, which forges a constitutive connection between life, ownership, and liberty.

JB: Yes, but perhaps we have to be careful about how we differentiate these particular histories. After all, there may be many political imaginaries of “the West,” and “the West” is surely also a function of a political imaginary itself. But you are suggesting, rightly, that property relations have come to structure and control our moral concepts of personhood, self-belonging, agenc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Preface
• 1 Aporetic dispossession, or the trouble with dispossession
• 2 The logic of dispossession and the matter of the human (after the critique of metaphysics of substance)
• 3 A caveat about the “primacy of economy”
• 4 Sexual dispossessions
• 5 (Trans)possessions, or bodies beyond themselves
• 6 The sociality of self-poietics: Talking back to the violence of recognition
• 7 Recognition and survival, or surviving recognition
• 8 Relationality as self-dispossession
• 9 Uncounted bodies, incalculable performativity
• 10 Responsiveness as responsibility
• 11 Ex-propriating the performative
• 12 Dispossessed languages, or singularities named and renamed
• 13 The political promise of the performative
• 14 The governmentality of “crisis” and its resistances
• 15 Enacting another vulnerability: On owing and owning
• 16 Trans-border affective foreclosures and state racism
• 17 Public grievability and the politics of memorialization
• 18 The political affects of plural performativity
• 19 Conundrums of solidarity
• 20 The university, the humanities, and the book bloc
• 21 Spaces of appearance, politics of exposure
• Index