The readings this week – it was as if I did not completely understand Hanna Arendt’s piece until Judith Butler came into the picture. The interaction between these two texts is much more interesting than either of them alone, in my humble opinion. The greatest takeaway from the readings was tackling questions on the body, the (act?) of speaking, and agency. Hanna Arendt clearly delimitates between acting and speaking, making the “act” a concerted action, or an action that represents the beginning of something – perhaps a revolution. She attributes this as well to speaking, “If action as beginning corresponds to the fact of birth, then speech corresponds to the fact of distinctness and is the actualization of the human condition of plurality, that is, of living as a distinct and unique human being among equals” (Arendt 178). Arendt inextricably links speaking and action, as both of them, in her view, are required to answer the question [from every newcomer], “Who are you?” (178). It translates to identity. It communicates identity.
Arendt continues to nail down this point with, “In acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world, while their physical identities appear without any activity of their own in the unique shape of the body and sound of the voice” (179). There is an element here where Arendt marries speech and action, or that action is a condition of speech, or vice versa, that also represents the plurality of the human condition, that acting and speaking bring people together and, for lack of a better term, is the stuff of revolution.
I think immediately of the trans actress MJ Rodriguez, who stated recently in an interview, “Simply being trans is activism.” Simply, her physical condition and attributes, not her actions nor speech, but simply that “physical identity” Arendt refers to – that is now activism, which does require a form of action. Judith Butler delves into her Arendtian critique on this issue in chapter 1 of Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. She problematizes the Arendtian view of “action” and “speech” particularly, and actually references trans politics:
“As we know, not everyone can take for granted the power to walk on the street or into a bar without harassment. To walk on the street alone without police harassment is precisely not to walk with the company of others and whatever nonpolice forms of protection that supplies. And yet, when a transgendered person walks on the street in Ankara or into McDonald’s in Baltimore, there is a question of whether that right can be exercised by the individual alone….To walk is to say that this is a public space in which transgendered people walk, that this is a public space where people with various forms of clothing, no matter how they are gendered or what religion they signify, are free to move without threat of violence. To be a participant in politics, to become part of concerted and collective action, one needs not only to make the claim for equality (equal rights, equal treatment), but to act and petition within the terms of equality, as an actor on equal standing with others” (Butler 53-54).
MJ Rodriguez could walk through the grocery store, and it would be seen as inherent activism; it could be seen as action, as the concerted act at being treated or seen as equal. This is the greatest divergence between the two texts; however, it is understandable as each was writing from her own specific political moment. It leaves me with questions of affect – what is the most effective form of action? Does it involve speech? The element of performativity is not contingent upon speech, as we have seen. How can we trace, measure or answer these questions of embodiment and action through the history of “performative assemblies?”