Judith Butler’s 2009 book “Frames of War, When is Life Grievable?” is comprised of a 5 essays worked on and written since 9/11 and an introduction to give them a unifying context. In her introduction, entitled: Precarious Life, Grievable Life, she starts off by giving one of her goals as the bringing to light of how the frames we think in and apprehend life are politically saturated. “[The frames] are themselves operations of power. They do not unilaterally decide the conditions of appearance but their aim is nevertheless to delimit the sphere of appearances itself.” The framing of life will have major ramifications on topics such as biology, neuroscience, as well as debates on reproductive freedom and euthanasia but her focus will be “on why and how it becomes easier, or more difficult, to wage [war].”
Precarity is a condition of all life and it imposes on us an ethical claim. But to acknowledge the claim the precarity must be apprehended in an ethical way (sometimes apprehending the precarity of a life inspires greater violence – this would be a failure of the ethical dimension). Butler believes that the different allocations of precarity (not the different levels per se) is the starting point for both the ethical apprehension and the political struggle for better the world. “Allocation” has a double meaning: on the one hand we allocate different levels of precarity based on our apprehension of a life and secondly as a result of our actions individually and politically. Apprehension happens in our minds; recognition happens outside our minds through our actions. This means we often recognize things we do not apprehend. For example a person who unknowingly makes a racist or sexist comment is recognizing established hierarchies and values without apprehending them. If such a person is called out for their comments he or she may then apprehend them which may change behavior (recognition).
One of the things that almost everyone recognizes is the individuality of personhood – which off course Judith Butler denies. The entire western legal, social, and cultural system is based on the individuality of person. But it is a myth that is perpetuated by the “obvious” individualist notion that we are separate and independent beings. Consider that all life is precarious and needs certain conditions to be present in order to survive and thrive. We need each other and the entire ecosystem to live. Thus the precarity of life is a starting point to the ethical claim but it is often derailed by the individualist notion of personhood. Personhood is better posited as the social network that makes “our” life possible even while still being precarious. The notion that we can reduce or eliminate precarity is just wrong since all life is destined to die (in this sense all our lives are equally precarious). Likewise the notion that we are unconnected is just a fantasy that leads us to self-destruction because, instead of fighting for what really sustains the conditions for life, we instead miss-allocate precarity on others (by exploitation) in the mistaken belief that we are improving our state of precarity.
As an example Butler critiques both the pro-life and the pro-choice movements as failing to overcome the individualist notion of personhood. The right to life is a fiction because all life will die. For example the superhuman effort to keep a person alive in a state of living death for the sake of life is obscene. Further there are vast categories of life that could never be given the “right to life” – the notion that there is a line demarcating what constitutes life that needs to be debated and decided perpetuates the individualist notion of personhood and the separation of in-groups and out-groups. Butler seems to sympathize more with the pro-choice side today because the situation of the world is such that the conditions for the ideal (pro-life) world are nowhere near being reached. “[She is] arguing that there ought to be a more inclusive and egalitarian way of recognizing precariousness, and that this should take form as concrete social policy regarding such issues as shelter, work, food, medical care, and legal status.” In other words what pro-life and pro-choice groups should be fighting for are all the conditions necessary so that any woman can decide when she wants to have a child and all the supports necessary for the child to survive and thrive. As long as child birth imposes a serious cost to women such that abortion is preferable then the society has not yet reached an egalitarian recognition of precarity. Similarly if a doctor euthanizes a wounded soldier on the battlefield because there is no hope of saving the soldier this act while merciful (even if it is murder, in the case of it being against the soldiers will) is not the frame we should be looking at. Rather, we should be looking at the fact that the doctor and the soldier are in a war and that war is the problem in this case. The condition of the world is so bad that the actions of the individuals in it judged from the perspective of a better world could be abhorrent. Butler argues that the world needs to change. Debating the merits (or demerits) of the euthanizing doctor and/or woman who wants an abortion is focusing on the wrong frame. The fact that soldier can get euthanized and fetuses are aborted is a problem with the systems and networks in society not the people victimized by them. “In this sense, we can see that arguments against certain forms of war depend on the assertion that arbitrary modes of maximizing precariousness for some and minimizing precariousness for others both violate basic egalitarian norms and fail to recognize that precariousness imposes certain kinds of ethical obligations on and among the living…. Our obligations are precisely to the conditions that make life possible, not to ‘life itself,’ or rather, our obligations emerge from the insight that there can be no sustained life without those sustaining conditions, and that those conditions are both our political responsibility and the matter of our most vexed ethical decisions….We would not have a responsibility to maintain conditions of life if those conditions did not require renewal.”
Butler claims that war is the single most sensate and affect inducing and heightening activity in the world today which is used to control people and political discourse. And that “war has come to frame ways of thinking multiculturalism and debates on sexual freedom, issues considered separate from ‘foreign affairs.’” But there is hope: “Precarity cuts across identity categories as well as multicultural maps, thus forming the basis for an alliance focused on opposition to state violence and its capacity to produce, exploit, and distribute precarity for the purposes of profit and territorial defense.”
In the first essay, entitled Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect, Butler starts by claiming that our body’s survivability depends on others because it is vulnerable and to help us gauge situations we have a range of affects that respond to the situation. In these affective responses lies the start of continued or new morality and ethics: the frames in which we make intelligible the stuff and events around us. Consider for example the notion of “responsibility”. It is a very important notion for Butler because it forms a cornerstone for her morality of being responsible for the vulnerable and less fortunate but it has often been misappropriated as a morality of disengagement and separation when the poor are told to take individual responsibility for their own actions and the state of their world as a reason to take away social supports. Some more corrupted examples are waging war for peace, the common good, to spread democracy, or security. Framing war as a good or for a good cause is always wrong. War is wrong because “war seeks to deny the ongoing and irrefutable ways in which we are all subject to one another, vulnerable to destruction by the other, and in need of protection through multilateral and global agreements based on the recognition of a shared precariousness.” War may be unavoidable, it may profit or benefit some but it represents an error, a failure in the systems of society and cannot ever be a good thing. The power of affect can be seen in the images that came out of Abu Ghraib prison and the calls by the right wing not to show them. “It seems to me that those who sought to limit the power of the image in this instance also sought to limit the power of affect, of outrage, knowing full well that it could and would turn public opinion against the war in Iraq, as indeed it did.”
“Nationalism works in part by producing and sustain a certain version of the subject. We can call it imaginary, if we wish, but we have to remember that it is produced and sustained through powerful forms of media and that what gives power to their version of the subject is precisely the way in which they are able to render the subject’s own destructiveness righteous and its own destructibility unthinkable.” In other words a nationalist is one who is unwilling to consider their own and their country’s precariousness and uses the destructive power of the state to appease unconscious doubt with the false logic that if my nation is stronger and can crush all others then I and my nation are indestructible. “These normative frameworks establish in advance what kind of life will be a life worth living, what life will be a life worth preserving, and what life will become worthy of being mourned. Such views of lives pervade and implicitly justify contemporary war. Lives are divided into those representing certain kinds of states and those representing threats to state-centered liberal democracy, so that war can then be righteously waged on behalf of some lives, while the destruction of other lives can be righteously defended.”
To counter this we must begin by critically analyzing the notions of the bounded body. The notion that our bodies are only that which is enclosed by our skin is the conceptual starting point of individuality that leads to nationalism. However the integrity of our organs enclosed by our skin is entirely dependent on networks of security outside of our skin enclosed body. Our body is more helpfully thought of as a subsystem of several much larger systems that all need to work properly in order to guarantee our own body’s proper functioning and ability to thrive. “The boundary of who I am is the boundary of the body, but the boundary of the body never really belongs to me. Survival depends less on the established boundary to the self than on the constitutive sociality of the body.”