When is a Book Grievable?

 
I began reading Judith Butler’s Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? in a café in Sarajevo—rather appropriate, so I thought, given that a mere fifteen years ago this city was under siege, the scars and grief quite evident still. We have to make something of grief besides a call for war, Butler wrote in an earlier work, Precarious Life; loss and mourning are shared human experiences that can form the basis for political community. It is an intriguing point—that grief turns quickly to grievance is everywhere apparent in our contemporary wars. What we need is the political will to find alternatives to violence, whether on the part of the state or on the part of groups who justify their retributive actions on the basis of prior victimization. This is the discussion to which I hoped Frames of War would contribute.
 
Publishers Weekly calls this book a “turgid study,” an application of “murky linguistic and aesthetic analyses to a hodgepodge of topics” in the usual “jargon-clotted style” for which Butler is famous. Worse yet—for any well-known American academic—the book is slammed for conveying “no fresh thinking.” In the end, we are warned, Frames of War is sludgy and banal, virtually unreadable.¹ Cornel West, whose acclaim appears on the back cover, gives us an entirely different picture. He endorses the book with enthusiasm, heaping effusive praise on Butler, “the most creative and courageous social theorist writing today.” He promotes Frames of War as “an intellectual masterpiece” that is immersed in history and that brings together a new ontology with a “novel Left politics.” Intrigued by the disparity between these reviews, I began reading with interest. It didn’t take me long, however, to side with Publishers Weekly. Frames of War will be a major disappointment for anyone anticipating an astute political analysis that departs from leftist clichés and feminist, poststructuralist platitudes served up in convoluted, undigestable sentences. It succeeds only in telling us how desperately we need these departures. And how desperately we need political vision.
 
Butler’s stated purpose for this study is to respond to “contemporary war,” which is true only if we define war narrowly as U.S. military aggression against real or perceived threats of terrorism. But the scope is limited even further to U.S. military action in Iraq, referenced mostly with regard to the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. She is interested in drawing attention both to the epistemological problem raised by the ways in which war is “framed” and to the ontological problem that war raises for particular lives not considered worth living. These two concerns—framing and the “apprehension” of a life—are elaborated at length in the introduction and chapter 1. Butler relates these themes by asking how life is apprehended in the frames we are given by the media and governments in times of war, frames responsible for dividing humanity into grievable and nongrievable life. This is hardly a novel point. War has always divided people into friends and enemies; those whom we are willing to kill are those we no longer consider human. Once a population is selected for elimination, the job of the warmongers is simply to render it less than human. It worked in Rwanda, in the former Yugoslavia, Darfur, and in countless other regions. It will continue to work unless we formulate preventative political strategies.
 
Leaving aside the matter of “framing” for now, let’s consider Butler’s analysis of the apprehension of life. Vulnerability is a popular subject these days, drawing from such concepts as Hannah Arendt’s “mere life,” Giorgio Agamben’s “bare” or “naked” life, and inspired by such actualities as the precarious labor and daily life of non-status peoples.² For Arendt, mere life is what is left when humans are stripped of citizenship, rendering them ineligible for basic human rights when they are most in need of them. Agamben defines “bare life” as the condition of homo sacer, the Roman figure whose life was not sacrificeable because it had no worth to begin with. There is no punishment for the one who kills an individual characterized as bare life, for it is already considered to be unhuman. This life simply doesn’t count—a central term for Jacques Rancière, whose version of vulnerable life is featured in his account of “those who have no part” or those who don’t count in political life—the poor, the modern proletariat—and who bring no more than contention or disagreement (150).
 
To distinguish her ideas from those of her contemporaries, Butler outlines a notion of the “grievability” of life, which is the condition under which life actually matters. “Only under conditions in which the loss [of a life] would matter,” she argues, “does the value of the life appear” (14). A life that is worthy of grief becomes a “liveable life” in Butler’s terminology, and without this grievability “there is no life, or, rather, there is something living that is other than life” (15). This is a senseless obfuscation—one of many to come—of a rather simple idea. If we do not value a life, its loss means nothing to us. The prospect of the loss of loved ones makes us realize how valuable they are to us. We get this. And perhaps we can grant Butler the point that such lives are indeed more liveable than those that will not be grieved. But to argue that without the grief there is really no life, or “something living that is other than life,” makes no sense. It borders on the ludicrous when we read the following explanation: “Those we kill are not quite human, and not quite alive, which means that we do not feel the same horror and outrage over the loss of their lives as we do over the loss of those lives that bear national or religious similarity to our own” (42, emphasis added). In suggesting that some lives are not lives, Butler completely misses what is useful about Arendt’s and Agamben’s distinction between life that counts and life that does not: there is still life beyond “dehumanization.” When we are bereft of all rights, citizenship, and belonging to a human community, there is still life.
 
This insistence that some are not considered to be alive, rather than merely not human in a way that counts, does not seem to matter much in the long run. Butler’s point is that humans are inherently vulnerable; it is a condition we share, accompanied by great risks since we live only with the illusion of being in control of our lives. As we learned from Precarious Life, precarity implies that we are all social beings, exposed to the familiar and to the unknown, an exposure that obliges us to respond to others (Frames of War 14). (Following Emmanuel Levinas, Butler does not explain why we are obliged, or why others’ needs are assumed to “impinge” on us). But while life is by definition precarious or vulnerable, certain populations are designated as precarious politically speaking. They become exposed to injury and violence in greater degrees, vulnerable before the very state to which they need to appeal for protection (25-6). Again, her debt to Arendt, to Agamben, and to Foucault’s biopolitics is evident here. Bare life is produced by sovereign power, relentlessly, as we have learned from these authors.
 
Precarity is thus “politically induced” and it is this operation that Butler insists leftist politics must address. Why this should be the job of leftist politics rather than simply politics, is a question we might want to ask. She implies that those on the left are in a privileged position to reverse the process whereby life becomes “ungrievable.” But her call for a “reconceptualization of the Left” (book flap) entails the same old tricks of the trade: a pronounced emphasis on recognition, cultural difference and identification with powerlessness. This last point may sound exaggerated, but I would argue that powerlessness is the condition we settle for when we are content with merely recognizing or acknowledging precarity as fundamental to human life. If we stop there, we risk reducing vulnerable life to a state of agentless victimhood, a condition that comes with a certain moral authority and may inspire pathos rather than action. The tone of Butler’s discussion of precarity is worrisome in this respect; we find here a celebration of fragility without an accompanying call for political will and action.
 
Butler insists that a solidarity based on precarity cuts across identity categories and therefore shifts the terms of a leftist politics that is overly preoccupied with identifications. This shift is supposed to help the left refocus and expand the political critique of state violence by providing a new alliance in opposition to the exploitation and violence of the state. Such an alliance “would not require agreement on all questions of desire or belief or self-identification. It would be a movement sheltering certain kinds of ongoing antagonisms among its participants, valuing such persistent and animating differences as the sign and substance of a radical democratic politics” (32). She is not alone in this formulation. Consider Agamben’s description of the protesters at Tiananmen Square as a community “radically devoid of any representable identity” or condition of belonging (The Coming Community 85-87). To build an alliance on the common lot of precarity, however, fails to alleviate one of the main dilemmas of a politics based on identity: how to form political solidarities that do not become exclusionary and ultimately replicate the identical abuses of power they contest. Butler thus exposes one of the most relentless dangers of a leftist, identity-focused political approach in her own argument; precarious life as a basis for solidarity, when this is the very condition produced by state violence, risks merely turning the tables of power, hostility or violence. Calling for an alliance of precarious lives, she is simply pouring new wine into old wineskins.
 
Identity politics as we know it is precarity politics. Group identities become solidified based on a common experience of victimhood. Butler acknowledges this herself when she approvingly refers to Wendy Brown’s incisive critique of “wounded attachments” as a basis for subjectivity (Butler 179). The risk—when injury becomes the defining moment of the subject—is that violence can easily be justified on this ground (see Brown). We would be wise then to listen to Arendt’s assertion that the solidarity of persecuted peoples does not last longer than a minute after their liberation. It becomes dangerous, in fact, when it is believed that “life comes fully into its own only among those who are, in worldly terms, the insulted and injured” (“On Humanity” 13)
 
It would be interesting to figure out precisely how precarity or vulnerability could also be the basis of our political strength, a point Václav Havel elaborated decades ago in The Power of the Powerless (1985). I had hoped that Butler would pursue this, and tell us how leftist politics—or any politics for that matter—could help. But her discussion of precarity only leaves us with truisms, which makes me wonder whom she considers her audience to be. For example, she remarks that “To live is always to live a life that is at risk from the outset and can be put at risk or expunged quite suddenly from the outside and for reasons that are not always under one’s control” (30). This is followed with: “Part of the very problem of contemporary political life is that not everyone counts as a subject” (31). Would her audience not already know this? If she is writing to a left-wing, intellectual audience, she should address the question of where we go from here. If Butler is writing for readers outside of academic institutions and unfamiliar with her work or contemporary cultural theory in general, on the other hand, the jargon-filled, bumpy sentences would be so off-putting as to make this book unreadable indeed. And if she is writing for a community of scholars, the truisms (and the jargon-filled, bumpy sentences) equally make for tedious reading.
 
While the idea of precarity has certainly caught on—we read these days about the precarious status of global laborers, of refugees and migrants, and of impoverished slum dwellers—without some direction on how shared vulnerability can help us refuse powerlessness, we may wallow in pity for a fragile humanity. As others besides Butler have done, we must seek power in the refusal of powerlessness. This power does not derive from any moral authority granted to the victim, but from what Havel called “humanity’s revolt against an enforced position … an attempt to regain control over one’s own sense of responsibility” (153). We need to address, in other words, the responsibility of vulnerable populations, not simply responsibility to them. This is why I am drawn to the writings of Partha Chatterjee, who is certainly aware of precarious lives in the slums of Calcutta, but does not rob them of their own agency. These inhabitants are indeed “the governed,” but they nurture what Chatterjee calls “political society,” a designation for those groups who may live illegally in a number of ways for the sake of survival, but who “make a claim to habitation and livelihood as a matter of right” (40). They have acquired a political existence where none was provided, showing how it may thrive in unexpected places. This is an example of what Havel describes as the “power of the powerless.” For Rancière, it is essentially the definition of politics: that those “who have no part” assume their fundamental equality and contest the forces that seek to take it away. This is at the same time an assumption of responsibility for their own agency. If we must make something of grief besides a call for war, we must do more than dwell on the suffering of those deemed ungrievable.
 
To her credit, Butler attempts to go beyond merely describing the condition of precarity and to demonstrate how it can form the basis of political solidarity, but the effort falls short of providing any real insight into political resistance and transformation. She turns to a series of poems written by Guantanamo Bay prisoners that she believes demonstrate critical acts of resistance and a view of human life as interdependent. “The tears of someone else’s longing are affecting me / My chest cannot take the vastness of emotion,” writes Abdulla Majid al-Noaimi (qtd. in Butler 59). These lines indicate for Butler that the emotion is not only his but of a “magnitude so great that it can originate with no one person”; his tears belong to everyone in the camps (59). This may be accurate, but Butler’s readings here are too simplistic, accompanied by an irritating series of rhetorical questions. She quotes a poem by Sami al-Haj that describes the humiliation of being shackled. “How can I write poetry?” he asks. Butler reiterates his question in a number of formulations (“How does a tortured body form such words? Is it the same body that suffers torture and that forms the words on the page?”), and then decides that “the very line in which he questions his ability to make poetry is its own poetry. So the line enacts what al-Haj cannot understand” (56). Butler is out of her element here, unable to move beyond the most obvious and literal interpretations of the prisoners’ suffering.
 
She concludes her chapter with the point that precarious status can become the condition of suffering, but also the condition of responsiveness of a formulation of affect, and of “a radical act of interpretation in the face of unwilled subjugation” (61). Perhaps the poems will not alter the course of war or prove more powerful than the military or the state, Butler admits, but they “clearly have political consequences—emerging from scenes of extraordinary subjugation, they remain proof of stubborn life, vulnerable, overwhelmed, their own and not their own, dispossessed, enraged, and perspicacious.” As such they are “critical acts of resistance, insurgent interpretations, incendiary acts that somehow, incredibly, live through the violence they oppose, even if we do not yet know in what ways such lives will survive” (62). This seems to be naively optimistic. Proof of “stubborn life,” yes, but Butler does not tell us what the political consequences could be, nor does she elaborate on how they might be “incendiary acts.”
 
Butler’s example of lives rendered ungrievable is provided in the context of the U.S. war on terror. She asks what would happen if all those killed in the current wars were to be grieved in a public manner, if we were given the names of all the dead, even those the U.S. has killed, of whom we are never given an image, name or story (39). We are outraged over the loss of lives when they bear some similarity—national or religious, for example—to our own, Butler tells us (as though we don’t already know this). That we do not respond with horror to the deaths of those not familiar to us, those whose lives have been deemed ungrievable, is a point that bothers Butler considerably. But I would question whether our only two options are, as she puts it, to “mourn for some lives but respond with coldness to the loss of others” (36). Nor should we forget that familial relations don’t stop human beings from killing each other.
 
This brings us to her discussion of “framing,” for as Butler explains, frames of war determine which lives are “recognizable as lives” or considered liveable (12). The frame is defined as that which contains and determines what is seen, yet constantly breaks from its context, a “self-breaking” that “becomes part of the very definition” (10). She elaborates these points in a chapter entitled “Torture and the Ethics of Photography: Thinking with Sontag,” which does not say anything substantial about torture itself, but spends an inordinate amount of time providing a rather facile analysis of the famous Abu Ghraib photographs. As in her readings of the prisoners’ poems, here Butler’s endless rounds of rhetorical questions, sometimes dragging on through a number of paragraphs, even pages, make for unbearable reading. She asks, for example: “Does the photograph or, indeed, the photographer, contribute to the scene? Act upon the scene? Intervene upon the scene?” (84) A page later we read: “The photograph depicts.… [W]hat other functions does it serve? What other effects does it produce? … If the photo represents reality, which reality is it that is represented? And how does the frame circumscribe what will be called reality in this instance?” (85). And so forth.
 
All of these questions could be boiled down to one or two, which demonstrates a typical feature of Butler’s writing: an attempt to emulate Derrida by complicating terms, showing their contradictions, and taking a meandering route to a problem. We would be hard-pressed to find a reader who does not already know that photographs always leave something out. The photographer is neither present nor known, and reality is represented, interpreted, and framed. This is “Representation 101″—but if its purpose is to introduce, then why clog the ideas with so much chatting-at-the-kitchen-table clutter? Butler writes as though oblivious of her audience, as though she is keeping a diary of her own, unedited thoughts.
 
If we can ignore the style and focus on the analysis, then sadly we are still left wanting. Butler discusses the Abu Ghraib photographs for a number of pages. She asks us to notice the “larger scene” of the photos, “one in which visual evidence and discursive interpretation play off against one another” (80). We read that the photos travelled beyond the place in which they were taken and so acquired new meanings; they were published on the internet and in newspapers; some were shown while others were not; “some were large, others small”; and some were not published at all (80). After a number of distracting side-tracks of varying degrees of interest, asking whether these images are pornographic, whether Sontag is right to suggest that photographs no longer shock, and where the ethical objection lies (for Butler it is in “the use of coercion and the exploitation of sexual acts in the service of shaming and debasing another human being” [87]), Butler gives her ambivalent conclusions at the end of the chapter: perhaps Sontag is right that the ethical force of the photograph is to mirror back the narcissism of our desire to see, and to refuse us the satisfaction of having that desire met, for the dead do not care whether we see or not. Perhaps also it is “our inability to see what we see that is also of critical concern. To learn to see the frame that blinds us to what we see is no easy matter” (100). She concludes by once again clumsily stating the obvious:
 

 

This “not seeing” in the midst of seeing, this not seeing that is the condition of seeing, became the visual norm, a norm that has been a national norm, one conducted by the photographic frame in the scene of torture. In this case, the circulation of the image outside the scene of its production has broken up the mechanism of disavowal, scattering grief and outrage in its wake.
 

(100)

 

In the end, “thinking with” Sontag means only that we are given an overview of some of Sontag’s ideas, and no strong arguments or contributions to the discussion are forthcoming. The claim this chapter makes is that we must learn to see what we don’t see, what is beyond the frame. Quite simply, we need to “look” elsewhere. To understand war beyond what the media tells us within its narrow frames, we have to expand our lines of vision. Butler would do well to take note of her own frames.

 
Finally, I turn to my most serious objection to Frames of War—that it continues a line of thinking quite prevalent in academic parlance today, particularly of the leftist, “emancipatory discourse” variety, one that I find morally irresponsible. For Butler—faithful to her poststructuralist heritage—responsibility is a predominant concern. We read in the first chapter that responsibility arises from our being bound to one another and from the demand this binding places on us (a point embedded in another litany of rhetorical questions—”am I responsible only to myself? Are there others for whom I am responsible? … Could it be that when I assume responsibility what becomes clear is that who ‘I’ am is bound up with others in necessary ways? Am I even thinkable without that world of others?” [35]). Butler alludes to her “brief reflections on the perils of democracy,” but only gives us a few platitudes with which her readers would most likely be quite familiar, such as the idea that global responsibility does not mean bringing American-style democracy to other nations. This would be an “arrogant politics,” she says, and an irresponsible form of global responsibility (37). How many of her readers would disagree?
 
So what would a globally responsible politics look like? Butler does not provide a satisfying answer to this question. What she does provide are more reasons to object—strenuously and urgently—to cultural relativism, hardly innocuous in these times when “cultures” are at war with their others, each claiming moral immunity for their own crimes in the name of tradition and cultural purity. Culture has become a crucial alibi against moral approbation, and Western scholars are among the most vehement defenders of the ban on judgment.³ Butler’s last three chapters, which deal in large part with the West’s fraught relationship to Islam, include a familiar critique of the “Western” notions of progress, of universal norms, of approaches to violence, and even of sexual politics (surprisingly, Butler does not appear overly outraged in her discussion of Islamic regimes’ policies toward gays). There is considerable fence-sitting in these chapters, as Butler grapples with the conflict between sexual freedom and religious principles, but falls short of taking a stand. For example, although she argues that it is not a question of “the rights of culture [threatening] to trump rights of individual freedom,” for all intents and purposes culture appears everywhere in these chapters as immutable, imposing, and on par with sexual orientation, and we are not given a route out of the impasse when these come into conflict. Butler only recommends we continue to think with Laclau and Mouffe that antagonism keeps open an alliance (between religious and sexual minorities) and “suspends the idea of reconciliation as a goal” (148). This is not helpful advice for Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, a 45-year-old Iranian woman who awaits death by stoning as I write this, for committing the sin of adultery. Will someone please tell me why we cannot condemn outright a religion or culture for denying equality to a particular segment of society?
 
Slavoj Żižek would call this the “antinomy of tolerant reason.” In our “tolerance” of the “other”—whether cultural, racial, ethnic, religious, or geopolitical—liberal-minded citizens of Western democracies become tolerant of intolerance. Apologies for our own cultural beliefs or practices proliferate, while those who remain steadfast in their intolerance of, or hostility toward, the West are not expected to be apologetic. Multicultural tolerance, Žižek concludes, leads to a lack of respect for the Muslim other, demonstrating a “hidden and patronizing racism” (115). This is why Frames of War abdicates its moral, political, and intellectual responsibility. The most disappointing effects of this can be found in the final chapter, “The Claim of Non-Violence,” which shuffles impotently between intellectual obfuscations of violence and non-violence. Today, when we most urgently need to resist a global political paradigm that preaches death and destruction in the name of security, the operative question (in a book that promises to be philosophical and political) should not be: how can I make a call for non-violence if I, as a subject, am formed through norms that are by definition violent?⁴ Butler concludes only that non-violence can’t be a universal principle, that it “arrives as an address or an appeal” entailing some work on our part to consider under what conditions we can be responsive to such a claim (165). Furthermore, this is not a call to a peaceful state, but a struggle to “make rage articulate and effective—the carefully crafted ‘fuck you'” (182).
 
I find this line, quite frankly, appalling. The buildings and sidewalks of Sarajevo are pock-marked with thousands of carefully crafted “fuck-you”s. We cannot tell from mortar fire whose rage is the “good” rage Butler condones. This is where her attempt to deconstruct—with tolerance of ambiguity and with “cultural sensitivity” but without moral judgment—inevitably leads. It may be true that “We judge a world we refuse to know, and our judgment becomes one means of refusing to know that world” (156), but the opposite is also true and perhaps more relevant for our times: we know a world we refuse to judge, and our knowing becomes one means of refusing to judge that world.