Critique and Praxis by Bernard E. Harcourt

Author:Bernard E. Harcourt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI040000, Philosophy/Movements/Critical Theory, PHI019000, Philosophy/Political
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2020-08-11T00:00:00+00:00

As much as we must insist on there being material conditions for public assembly and public speech, we have also to ask how it is that assembly and speech reconfigure the materiality of public space and produce, or reproduce, the public character of that material environment. And when crowds move outside the square, to the side street or the back alley, to the neighborhoods where streets are not yet paved, then something more happens.95

When protesters move into the side streets and try to create nonsanctioned spaces of protest, “something more happens”—indeed, they contest the authority to limit and contain protest (and they usually get arrested). Butler argues that these forms of defining space challenge boundaries between public and private—showing or otherwise revealing that politics is already in the private, in the home, in the personal.

Now, to suggest that assembly can affect our conceptions of politics is perhaps somewhat tautological because that is often the very purpose of assembly. So it may be important to distinguish further between performance and productivity. To say that assembly can unveil the politics in the home, on the street, or in the neighborhood seems certainly right. In fact, it is because many have come to understand that the personal is political, and that the public/private distinction is problematic, that they are in the street protesting. But beyond that, we could say that assembly does other things. Assemblies can be prefigurative. They can create democratic forms that do not exist elsewhere. They can instantiate relations between citizens that are uncommon, equal, even glorious. They can do all these things. These are productive effects for sure. And one could use the discourse of performativity to say that assemblies “perform” these things. But the difference between productive and performative is that the political is more hidden in performativity—and it is not hidden in assembly. Before, when we performed gender unknowingly, we did not think that it was a political act. But when we perform assembly, we do that precisely because it is a political act. There may be hidden dimensions that we ignore because of our biases; however, we are in the street or on the square to perform politics. The performative theory of assembly, in sum, does not render something political that wasn’t before. It just becomes another vocabulary to talk about its productivity: we assemble to challenge the political status quo, to instantiate new forms of interpersonal relations, to prefigure new modes of democracy, to trouble in all these ways established political relations. But we do that intentionally and by design, regardless of the language we use. We can call it “performative,” we can call it “organizing,” we can call it “subversive,” but all along, we knew what we were doing—which was not the case with gender previously. Butler writes: “Many of the massive demonstrations and modes of resistance we have seen in the last months not only produce a space of appearance; they seize upon an already established space permeated by existing power, seeking to sever the relations between the public space, the public square, and the existing regime.

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