Two days after New York City police had power-washed the sidewalks of Zuccotti Park, Judith Butler, professor of rhetoric from the University of California at Berkeley, gave a talk at the University of Massachusetts on “Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street.” Butler is a small woman who wears men’s clothes and, at least on college campuses, has a very big fan base. When she stepped onto the stage, the crowd erupted. “You’re a rock star!” shouted one young woman behind me. The audience whooped and whistled. She noted the enthusiasm and then went to work.
“Our ideas of political action need to be rethought,” she stated, reading from a prepared lecture. Leading us patiently through her careful argument, she helped us to reconsider what it means to inhabit a public sphere. The political life we’ve seen in Tahrir Square and more recently in Zuccotti Park, she explained, are worlds away from pluralist notions of a public sphere, where citizens deliberate rationally about public matters. In the old public sphere, citizens operated as if they were not weighed down with needs, personal troubles, and bodily limitations. In these new public spaces, bodies bring their concerns and limits to the bargaining table, caring for each other, feeding each other, and providing shelter for one another.
Most of Butler’s argument was directed against the German American political theorist Hannah Arendt, who, in 1958, described the advantages of the public sphere over the tyranny of the private sphere. In the public sphere, citizens dropped their private concerns and deliberated with another over what was best for the country. In the private sphere, babies needed their nappies changed and old people demanded quiet at naptime. In ancient Greek society, the private sphere was inhabited by women, children and slaves, whose lives were dominated by the demands of “mere life.” The public sphere, on the other hand, was inhabited by citizens, freed of those daily concerns. Freedom for Arendt, as for Aristotle, was the freedom to think beyond the basic concerns of the body. The essence of freedom was the practice of deliberation.
But as Butler and other feminists theorists have pointed out, not everyone was included in the deliberation. While the public sphere sounded inclusive, in practice remarkably few people were allowed into the public discussion. Those who had children to feed, or whose aging bodies kept them confined in the home never gained much influence in public affairs. Women and the descendants of African slaves were often considered lacking in the necessary mental instruments to engage in public deliberations.
To be fair, it’s not just critical theorists who have undermined the practices of the public sphere. Given corporate control of the media, the idea that ordinary citizens can actually persuade one another seems naïve and ridiculous. Who can believe in deliberation and persuasion when words are bought by advertisers and ideas are owned by parties? Politics in late capitalist America is not an exchange of reasonable ideas, but the shrill and competing sounds of certainty. There’s a reason more people are paying attention to Zuccotti Park than Capital Hill. Maybe we hope to see a glimmer of that old pluralist myth. Maybe we will hear people talking to each other, persuading one another, arguing with one another so that the best idea might come to the top.
For Butler, however, deliberation and persuasion aren’t nearly as interesting as seeing bodies cohabit in public places. “It matters,” Butler said last month at Occupy Wall Street, “that as bodies we arrive together in public. As bodies we suffer, we require food and shelter, and as bodies we require one another in dependency and desire. So this is a politics of the public body, the requirements of the body, its movement and its voice.” Broken into crisp sentences, capable of being delivered over the human microphone, Butler’s words gave her audience a way to enunciate themselves out of the twentieth-century pluralist public sphere and into full-fleshed members of a postmodern corpus mysticum. Had I been there, I would have been thrilled to participate in this glorious and transformative politics of presence.
And yet, as I watched the packed auditorium hang on her every word, I began to get a bit anxious about this new form of politics. Rather than determine political action through the mechanisms of pluralism, deliberation and debate, Butler was describing a decision-making process that could easily be manipulated by a charismatic leader. This new body-based politics suggests that we just have to show up, that we just have to acknowledge our precarious existence as inhabiters of mortal flesh. We don’t need to think.
Not that Butler is by nature a charismatic leader. Before her speeches were delivered through the human mic, she was lampooned for her incomprehensible prose. Once, when I was teaching freshman English at U Mass Amherst, I tried to copy one of her more serpentine sentences on to a full-sized blackboard, but before I neared the finish line I ran out of room. The class was greatly amused to see an Eminent Thinker brought down to their level.
Fourteen years later, the Occupiers of Everything had risen to her level. They had brought their bodies to Bowker Auditorium and in their newly-described freedom they wanted to cherish her for having noticed them. In so many ways, the lecture was such a lovely enactment of her ideas, of how this “politics of the public body” brought a real sense of possibility and abundance to a college audience whose future was damaged by debt.
But as the line gathered behind the microphone, and members of the congregation used the Q & A time to adore her, I started to miss the old days of deliberation. Had I been able to reach the mic, I would have asked, “Must we always be forced to leave either our thoughts or our bodies at the door?” I’m sure she would have given me something worthwhile to think about.
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