Action, for Hannah Arendt, which is never possible in isolation, generates the emergence of a neo-nascence, a new birth, for the actor, constituting and composing their subjectivity. It is in these actions, which are always interactions, that the subject emerges, using speech to construct their distinctness as well as their identifications with collectives. Judith Butler, in Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly, rethinks ‘action’ as well as the discursive and performative practices shaping subjecthood as spaces of appearance, where assemblies come to materialize both matter and meaning, and which are always performative. She expands her theorizing of performativity, specifically how it is related to gender, drawing on Arendt, but also pushing back against her, noting that the ‘in-betweeness’ of subjects formulated by Arendt still carries Arendt’s own gender and racial politics, and questioning Arendt’s presupposition that the body does not enter the speech act and that the public and private spheres are always already separated. Despite this, Butler engages with Arendt’s theory, acknowledging that she shows that “the body or, rather, concerted bodily action–gathering, gesturing, standing still, all of the component parts of ‘assembly’ that are not quickly assimilated to verbal speech–can signify principles of freedom and equality” (Butler, 48).
Butler articulates this becoming part of “collective or concerted action” as being synonymous with becoming a participant in politics (maybe we could consider this as one of the points of our main project?). In this ‘becoming’ (Arendt would say ‘birth’), one needs to make a claim for equality as an actor on equal standing with others. This making of a claim is part of the performativity of the assembly, and the root of its power–it is interesting to note that Arendt described ‘power’ and Butler described ‘popular assemblies’ in the language of a kind of thermodynamics or electromagnetism, highlighting their understanding of the experimental nature of concerted action as well as their understanding of the role of environment in the process of meaning, mattering, materialization (see Arendt p. 200 and Butler p. 7). This ‘environment’ was articulated by Arendt and drawn on by Butler as the ‘space of appearance’. For Arendt, to be excluded from the space of appearance was to be denied the right to have rights, and, as Butler tells us, “the people” are not just produced by their vocal claims, but also “by the conditions of possibility of their appearance… and by their actions” (Butler, 19). Butler elaborates this to be true not just of “the people” but of “the person,” positing the entanglement and mutual constitution of these bodies–indeed, Butler goes on to tell us that “the body is less an entity than a living set of relations; the body cannot be fully dissociated from the infrastructural and environmental conditions of its living and acting” (Butler, 65).
The action of the body is always conditioned action (twice behaved behavior!), which marks part of the historical character of the body. The coalescence of historicized bodies into a historically and future transformation–that is, an assembly–is an interesting play with our naturalized invention of time. It seems that in an assembly, where one must make a claim for equality as an actor on equal standing with others, one must also make a claim for a new temporality and spatiality: a spatiality and temporality which, because of its orientation in relation to the naturalized spatiality and temporality, is inherently queer (and I would add also ‘trans-‘ in the sense of the prefix–meaning ‘across’, ‘beyond’, ‘changing thoroughly’–but also in order to inscribe the trans body with power in the ‘space of appearance’). This queer spacetime is seen in Arendt’s “Irreversibility and the Power to Forgive” and “Unpredictability and the Power of Promise” though it is not articulated. As bodies–through identifications and disidentifications, through orientations and disorientations–we are already assemblies, and, as assemblies, we persist. In this way, ‘assemblies’ are flows and coalescences of energy, creating and conditioned by location, historically rooted and oriented toward the future; in this way, assemblies are performative/political.