Here’s hoping that by Thursday the University agrees to pay us a minimum subsistence wage or at least agrees to wage increases to cover rates of inflation.
The conversation between Spivak and Butler addresses various conceptualizations of the state and of statelessness and further questions the validity of those conceptualizations both as descriptive frameworks and as prescriptive frameworks for political opposition in our contemporary globalized or ‘post-national’ climate. Drawing from (and critiquing) the likes of Arendt, Agamben, Rousseau, Marx, Habermas, and Derrida, the conversation might be considered theoretical bricolage: as they discuss the various theories, their own notion of statelessness develops (a few theorists that were implicit to their conversation are Gramsci, Althusser and Foucault, although I’m sure there are many more that I could not identify).
In advance of the presentation, I’d like to summarize just a few ways in which Butler and Spivak address the nation-state and the notion of statelessness.
Butler initially provides two conceptualizations of the state: state as nation and state as mode of being (which I understand to mean both positionality and personal experience). These are not mutually exclusive; the geographical, legal and institutional components of the state define a mode of being, specifically the mode of belonging or non-belonging in terms of citizenship. Conceived in this way, the position of statelessness is not what Butler calls a position of “bare life”; to be dispossessed by the state does not put the subject outside of power or politics, but is in fact a position constituted by power and politics. Put another way, the power of the state is a power of categorization and through categorization, the state may include or exclude.
Butler also considers performative aspects of the nation-state. Singing the national anthem is traditionally understood as a symbol of national unity, although in one instance in California to which she refers, the singers are illegal immigrants who sing the American anthem in a ‘non-authorized’ way (in Spanish). Butler asks, is it possible that this articulation “actually fractures the “we” in such a way that no single nationalism could take hold on the basis of that fracture?” (62). Butler considers it to be an assertion of equality and exercise of freedom because “both the ontologies of liberal individualism and the ideas of a common language are forfeited in favor of a collectivity that comes to exercise its freedom in a language or a set of languages for which difference and translation are irreducible” (62).
However, she does not go so far as to say that the act of exercising freedom through the performative act (the freedom of speech and assembly that they do not legally have) is efficacious – Butler distinguishes two rights: “That first right would never be authorized by any state, even as it might be a petition to or for authorization. The second set of rights is the rights that would be authorized by some rule of law” (constitution) (65). There is a gap between the act of exercising freedom and the authorization of freedom, and she imagines that it is this gap that may be mobilized for the purpose of striving toward equality (69).
Spivak complements Butler’s eloquence and “theoretical passion, about the implications of statelessness in California” (71), but provides much needed contemporary political-economic context to the discussion. The nation-state, she says, is in decline due to political and economic restructuring to allow for free(er) flows of global capital. States have lost their redistributive power as priorities become global and we now see ‘polyglot areas’ or ‘critical regionalisms’ cohering as well as extra-state entities such as the WTO. How does this effect Butler’s proposition of mobilizing the gap? “Judith speaks of a right inhabiting a performative contradiction. My point would be that those rights are now in the declarative, in a universal declaration rather than a performative contradiction” (81-82).
I’m still working Spivak’s argument, and hopefully I can provide some more insight on Thursday.
Questions:
1. In preparation for this presentation, I have been trying to find clips to show that don’t just take the nation-state as its subject, but that might be considered a form of articulation that fractures national unity. If enunciations that act as a fissure in national unity become the condition of equality, how might you conceive such an enunciation in cinema? Are these fissures just produced through linguistic differences, or may they be conceived in other ways? Can you provide any examples?
2. How has cinema incorporated shifts toward universal declaration or critical regionalisms?
3. I’m still working on a third question…
