In exploring the question of how spaces of appearance are generated, Hannah Arendt first connects action and speech in the natal scene, proposing action as that which brings the subject into existence anew and speech as what allows this subject to establish itself as a distinct individual in a plural world: “If action as beginning corresponds to the fact of birth, if it is the actualization of the human condition of natality, 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 being among equals” (178). Interestingly, by tying speech to the revelatory question “Who are you?” –that is to say, speech signifies–, Arendt further establishes a link between speech, action (which is necessarily meaningful), and subject, when she states that without speech, action “would not only lose its revelatory character…it would lose its subject” (178). Arendt takes up as one of her main stakes, the human relevance of action, action as being, speaking, and acting together. Her reading of the Greek polis establishes the political realm as “the ‘sharing of words and deeds’” in which action constitutes the public (198). Thus, as she elucidates below, the space of appearance is not limited to a physical location, rather, it is the materialization of the organization of people who act and speak to one another and together, always a potential space that has no guarantees of permanency, but rather is always on the verge of dispersal and disappearance.
The polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be.
(Arendt 198)
Like Arendt, Butler does not presuppose that public space is given; rather, these spaces are produced through political action, one of which can be acts of assembly that “reconfigure the materiality of public space and produce, or reproduce, the public character of that material environment” (71), a proper transformation of space. But while Arendt closely links speech to action, Butler argues that embodied practices can also signify meaning and provide the potential for and actualization of political action. Butler also concerns herself with questioning the unequal conditions of emergence of “beings disaggregated from the plural” (77). She posits the question, “who really are ‘the people’?” (3), from the perspective of the present.
This inquiry is situated within a historical time in which the question emerges: How is precarity enacted and opposed in sudden assemblies?
(Butler 22)
Within the context of the contemporary neoliberal reality in which certain populations are framed as “nongrievable lives” or “disposable,” that is, in which precarity is differentially distributed and often through biopolitical strategies (15), Butler focuses exactly on how those bodies who are excluded gather to contest a false notion of equality –here, the “indexical force of the body” (9) is what signifies– and, crucially, to argue that when bodies assemble (either bodily or virtually), they can do so as a form of resistance against State strategies of erasure and disappearance; a “bodily demand” is made (11). Butler also follows Arendt in that freedom happens as a relational act (88); she proposes a performative theory of assembly that moves beyond the individual to the collective, a move she argues is all the more important considering the ways in which capitalism is built upon the facets of individual self-sufficiency and competition, eroding communitarian values such as care. Butler takes as one of her stakes, the renewal of the meaning of “responsibility” in ethical terms and within the context of collective forms of assembly (14), a responsibility that is accompanied by a recognition: that we are always already implicated in relationships with others. I find her body of work on relationality to be extremely important to thinking about political work in our time.