In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt establishes the guidelines for her political project by valuing, first and foremost, participatory democratic processes and collective deliberations of public ails. Facing the contemporary demons of homogeneity and conformity that lead to the World Wars, Arendt purports action —as opposed to work or labor— as the vehicle by which humans make a claim for themselves in the political sphere. Through word and deed (speech and action), we insert ourselves in the public sphere. Even though we are all bound to our material and physiological needs as living beings, speech acts distinguish ourselves from the rest of our brethren, speaking to the predetermined plurality of human affairs. Surpassing the adage that actions speak louder than words, Arendt claims that there is an indivisibility between speech and action —that some actions need clarification and historization to be made significant, just as some words need actions to back up the person who speaks— just as there is an indivisibility of the individual from the collective —that is, that we never signify by ourselves, but are made visible and intelligible in the public sphere, in that space of appearance where one can appear before others and others appear before one. Therefore, in this interdependency lies the roots for power which, in Arendtian terms, appears wherever there is a polis—not a specific localizable geographic point on a map, but any space and time in which humans come together to debate a common grievance.
Butler comes into the foray in Notes towards a Performative Theory of Assembly by recognizing the limits of some of Arendt’s claims, recognizing that bodies assembled “speak” for themselves without the need of speech. How can the speechless, the stateless and the otherwise unprotected masses make a claim for themselves? By contributing her own theories on gender performativity, Butler localizes the differential distribution of precarity as the zone where the body speaks precisely as it acts. By recognizing the bodily dimensions of Arendtian action, by recognizing how bodies are themselves categorized and differentiated intersectionally, by also recognizing the material and infrastructural conditions necessary for a space of appearance to exist at all, Butler brings to the fore the myriad of ways in which bodies inscribe themselves in political struggles by way of appearing and congregating, by demonstrating their collective power in a concerted front against neoliberal conditions of precarity that threaten to eliminate all possibilities of political action.
Therefore, to protest precarity is to perform that very precarity. Contemporary public assemblies showcase an intersectional union of bodies, plural in form, whose predetermined living conditions make self-sufficiency nearly impossible. To act in the name of eliminating precarity means to recognize the common neoliberal struggle of so many bodies huddled together yearning to be free, and to show up in that stead despite the precarious conditions that limit our capacity to speak and act out.