Month: March 2014

“When are you going to stop considering that the weakness and the mistakes of others [condone and] account for your own prerogatives?”

—Ghassan Khanafani, “Returning to Haifa”

Qualifying Times

Qualifying times—for example, as “vulnerable times”—implies, among other things, an effort to demarcate an era, our era, from a previous one, but also to call our attention to the era’s duration. Epochal vulnerability, although often unendurable, is produced simultaneously as durable and endurable. Making the unendurable both durable and endurable is the essence of regime-made disasters.1 The framework of our conversation today, as I understand it, is an expression of the effort to point to a state of affairs that is overwhelmingly and rapidly deteriorating, as well as an effort to instill a sense of urgency, by qualifying a historical time with the same adjective that for the last decade and a half has been applied to so many things in our lives—from workers’ living conditions to the environment.

Two configurations of time are implied here, both anticipating the future:

• constant escalation: predicting that the future emanates from the present; that, in comparison with it, the morrow can only be worse; and that intervention in the course of that morrow is doomed to fail
• terminability of the actual present and insistence on the structural openness of the future, on its indeterminability and malleability, as a way to valorize human agency and the capacity to generate change and imagine a different state of affairs

If we consider that such hope for change is no less recursive than this type of qualifying times2—a recurring eruption of hope that mirrors the recurring failure to bring about change—the two configurations of time may not be that different. Both are expressions of a dead end for action under the current political regimes. The anticipated future, the desired new beginning that may or may not be achieved, traps us in a sovereign time, the temporality of a new, self-constituted beginning that institutes its power and authority as a fait accompli by making the past experiences of the governed population politically obsolete. The necessary—though insufficient—condition for change is the reversal of the arrow of time to make the past a point of departure for any discussion of the present, as a way to address the outcomes of modern times and modern sovereignty that were shaped by colonialism and made possible by the legalized theft of land, property, bodies, and the past of the governed population.

When we ask whether our times really are more vulnerable now than they were before, the answer is not evident. A few years ago, challenged by Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, I tried to analyze and frame separately many of the elements of the political regimes Arendt described, and then I reassembled them for display in a museum. The result was the Museum of Regime-Made Disasters.

Every object in it was in fact a record of vulnerability. The abundance of precedents coming from many corners of the colonial world and their recurrence outside and independent of the political regime that first used them demonstrate that all those regimes have a blueprint in common, a blueprint that should be sought and understood. It consists, I believe, of the existence and reproduction of a differential body politic that is made up of distinct groups that are ruled differently and creates differential vulnerability among the governed population.

The differential body politic has lasted long enough to make us forget its historical contingency and the fact that it reflects not the nature of a political regime but rather a specific historical formation of it. The only way to imagine an escape from the dead end created by those omnipresent differential sovereign regimes is to open the past and reclaim past experiences shut off by the temporality of the “new beginning” imposed by the sovereign power. Sovereign temporality has excluded forms of slowing down, redistribution, reparation, amendment, compensation, and restructuring of the discrete body politic and its relation with others.

Such opening and the potential histories it enables would help us imagine a new civil contract with all those who fell victim to—or are descendants of victims of—the great colonial theft. That theft is so often ignored today, along with the vulnerable bodies and precarious lives of past generations whose consent was never sought and whose ruin we have inherited.

Perpetrators and Victims

Pointing the arrow of time back does not mean looking for a single origin of the many kinds of sovereign regimes that practice differential ruling. It is rather a search for several historical moments in which violence was used to rule people differentially and oppress their resistance, in which violence was politically consolidated or reconsolidated, reaffirmed, and acknowledged as legitimate rule. In the past few years, I have been working on two such moments: the French Revolution and the transformation of Palestine into Israel. Different as they may be, these are two moments of constitutive violence in which a regime of differential rule was established. My first assumption has been that in both moments, dispossession and the creation of new subjects of oppression were accompanied by the shaping of other subjects as perpetrators. Thus the formation of a class of victims went with the formation of a class of perpetrators. My second assumption, implied by the first, is that perpetrators are not born but made. Isolating victims and their vulnerability is therefore problematic, not because it is the history of others that we are not allowed to narrate so as to give a voice to the oppressed but because the oppressed do not have a history apart from our own—apart from my own. In this history, we citizens—and I—are perpetrators, descendants and heirs of perpetrators; in this history, we—and I—were made perpetrators, inherited, naturalized, and transmitted modes of perpetration.

I articulate this with the help of Olympe de Gouges, an eighteenth-century French philosopher, and Ghassan Khanafani, a modern-day Palestinian writer. Almost four years after Louis XVI was dethroned, the men elected to the General Assembly decided to vote on executing the king. The General Assembly was the product of a new form of differential body politic, from which women, the poor, and the black were excluded already in August 1789. Shortly before the vote, de Gouges published a speech in defense of the king. She acknowledged his crimes but argued that the fault of monarchy should not be attributed solely to the monarch: “His ancestors served a draught of ills to France; unfortunately for him, the cup broke in his hands and spilled onto his head.” The fault of monarchy lies also with “our ancestors,” who for centuries recognized monarchy as legitimate power. “We should not punish him, for the ignorance of our ancestors and the crimes of his ancestors. . . . Beheading a king does not suffice to kill him—he lives long after his death, but if he survives the downfall of monarchy, he is truly dead.”3 Understanding that even monarchy is a political regime that should be understood as a complex of relations among the entire body politic, she proposed a different social contract, one that would reject sovereignty’s right to take lives and close off the past. In this civil contract, the king would be allowed to live and have the chance to learn how to live among his people without occupying further the position of a perpetrator, while the recently emancipated, though free to take his life, would have the chance not to become perpetrators themselves.

Khanafani’s novella “Returning to Haifa” is set in 1967, when Palestinian refugees living in the territories newly occupied by Israel were allowed to visit the places from which they had been expelled in 1948. Sa’id and Safiyya, a Palestinian couple, visit the home in Haifa that had been theirs. Miriam, a Holocaust survivor and now a Jewish Israeli citizen who lives in their house, lets them in. She moved there with her husband shortly after the Palestinian couple was uprooted and expelled. Sa’id and Safiyya have come to Haifa hoping to learn about their child, Khaldun, whom they left at home that April morning in 1948, not realizing that neither of them would be able to return. The abandoned baby was adopted by Miriam and her husband, who gave him a Hebrew name—Dov. Toward midnight, Dov enters the house, wearing his Israeli army uniform. When he is told that these unexpected guests are his biological parents, he responds with anger. He blames them for leaving Haifa and being responsible for their own plight: “You’re all weak! Weak! You’re bound by heavy chains of backwardness and paralysis!” (185).

After a moment of shock, his biological father collects himself and speaks to Dov, not to refute the accusation that the Palestinians are weak but to resist a civil contract founded on abuse of the weak by the strong. Sa’id urges Dov to recognize the right not to abuse others, the right not to become a perpetrator, even if becoming a perpetrator is precisely what is being expected of him. Sa’id says:

My wife asks if the fact that we’re cowards gives you the right to be this way. As you can see, she innocently recognizes that we were cowards. From that standpoint you are correct. But that doesn’t justify anything for you. Two wrongs do not make a right. If that were the case, then what happened to Iphrat and Miriam in Auschwitz was right. When are you4 going to stop considering that the weakness and the mistakes of others [condone and] account for your own prerogatives? . . . I know that one day you will realize these things, and you’ll realize that the greatest crime any human being can commit, whoever he may be, is to believe even for one moment that the weakness and mistakes of others give him the right to exist at their expense and justify his own mistakes and crimes. (185–86)

Had Dov exercised the right not to become a perpetrator, he would have renewed the failed efforts of his adoptive Jewish mother to do the same in 1948, when, for a brief moment, she tried to abstain from taking part in the dispossession and expulsion of her Palestinian neighbors.

Although failed, these moments are part of what has prevented sovereigns from totally consolidating the past as a fait accompli. They should be read as a legacy that we today can use, and should use, to exercise the right not to be perpetrators.

Notes

1. On regime-made disaster, see Azoulay. ↩

2. As an earlier example, see Arendt’s use of the notion “dark times” (Men). It is parallel to her constant effort to imagine the human capacity to bring about a new beginning and to act even though theoreticians of revolutions speak about the decreasing chances of revolution as the “destructive capacities of weapons at the unique disposition of governments” (On Violence 47). ↩

3. These quotations are from an unpublished translation by Michael Sawyer. For the original text, see Gouges 191–94. ↩

4. Karen E. Riley, the translator of Khanafani’s novella into English, emphasizes that the “you” in this sentence is in the plural. Thus, she argues, Sa’id addresses here not only Dov but also the Israeli Jews as a group (Khanafani 196). ↩

Works Cited

Arendt, Hannah. Men in Dark Times. New York: Mariner, 1970. Print.

———. On Violence. San Diego: Harcourt, 1969. Print.

———. The Origins of Totalitarianism. San Diego: Harcourt, 1976. Print.

Azoulay, Ariella. “A Tour of the Museum of Regime-Made Disasters.” Trans. Tal Haran. Humanity 4.3 (2013): 345–63. Print.

Gouges, Olympe de. Écrits politiques, 1792–1793. Paris: Indigo, 2007. Print. Des femmes dans l’histoire.

Khanafani, Ghassan. Palestine’s Children: “Returning to Haifa” and Other Stories. Trans. Barbara Harlow and Karen E. Riley. Boulder: Rienner, 2000. Print.

Ariella Azoulay is assistant professor at Brown University. A version of this paper was presented at the 2014 MLA convention in Chicago.

Posted March 2014

In August 2013, a few months before the twentieth anniversary of their armed uprising against the Mexican government on 1 January 1994, the Zapatistas decided to throw a party. Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés sent out word via the Zapatista Web site to “quienes se hayan sentido convocados” (“those who feel summoned”) to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the five caracoles (“autonomous municipalities”—literally, “snail shells”), each with its own rotating governing organization of women and men, the Council of Good Government (Junta de Buen Gobierno [JBG]) (“Fechas”).

The caracoles provide basic services to the Zapatista communities, who are predominantly Mayan and receive nothing but trouble from the Mexican government. On the rainy night of the party, vans, trucks, and cars lined up far along the road that goes past Oventic, the caracol closest to San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas. A sign on the road said:

ESTA USTED EN TERRITORIO

ZAPATISTA EN REBELDIA

“Aquí manda el pueblo

y el gobierno obedece”

 

YOU ARE IN ZAPATISTA REBEL TERRITORY:

“Here the people decide, and the government obeys.”

Past the unassuming metal gates that separate Oventic from the rest of Mexico, music reverberated from the loudspeakers. Standing in the pouring rain, the Zapatista men and women wearing ski masks and paliacates (“scarves”) asked people for their IDs. We, the visitors, waited under the tarp outside the Che Guevara gift shop and snack bar that bridges the caracol and the highway. Families and groups of indigenous peoples steadily entered. Some bought soft drinks and food at the entrance before moving past us toward the party. Alcohol is prohibited in all Zapatista communities. While some Mayans wore Western clothing—pants and sweatshirts—many were dressed in the native clothing of their various villages. The women from Chamula wore, against the cold and rain, their local thick black lambskin skirts and lovely embroidered tops under thin acrylic sweaters in all colors. Those from Zinacantán wore the beautiful blue-and-purple tops of their village. There were many other patterns from other regions, but I could not identify them (see Morris). To this day, the embroidery communicates meaning among indigenous peoples capable of deciphering them—“hidden transcripts,” as James C. Scott calls them (4–5), but in textiles. Bodily practices and the aesthetics of the everyday, for the Zapatistas, are never removed from politics. Sartorial style, especially the ski mask or the paliacate, the red bandana they wear, identified them all as Zapatista.

On view, from where I waited, were the contradictions and promise of the globalization and alter-globalization moments. Those who enjoy the economic and social mobility to travel come to visit those who fight to stay on their lands; Mayans in traditional clothing buy Coca-Cola in the Che Guevara snack bar while we Westerners buy their embroideries. The man who took our information wanted to know where we were from and why we wanted to be there. “To celebrate,” I said.

Indigenous resistance strategies have changed and adapted over the decades, some would say centuries, since the resisters started down el camino largo (“long road”) to autonomy. The Zapatistas have tried and experienced everything: the grassroots organizing of the 1980s; the armed warfare of early 1994; negotiations with the “bad” government, which produced the San Andrés Accords in 1996 (San Andres Accords), guaranteeing autonomy and rights to indigenous peoples; loss of faith in the Mexican government when it failed to honor the accords; the formation of an alternative “good” government and autonomous administrative centers in 2003; national marches throughout the country to make visible the Zapatista claims to justice and dignity (Otro jugador); closing the caracoles off from the world; opening them to national and international supporters; and now the invitation to celebrate and attend their escuelitas (“little schools”). Thousands of visitors came to Chiapas that August to live in the caracoles for a week and learn the Zapatista ways of living and thinking.1 The resistance movement works both on the macro and micro political levels: the celebration testified to the years of armed resistance against the Mexican government while the escuelitas worked in the micro arena of everyday politics in people’s homes.

Having finally been admitted, we walked down a slippery road to the official ceremony. A long line of civic representatives from the various Zapatista communities walked through the rain and stepped onto the platform—about thirty or forty men and women in traditional indigenous dress. Several young Zapatistas marched with the Mexican and EZLN flags (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional [“Zapatista Army of National Liberation”]) around the courtyard and stood at attentipon. The national anthem came over the loudspeakers, and young Zapatistas raised their arms in military salute. They too are “mexicanos al grito de guerra” (“Mexicans at the cry of war,” Mexico’s belligerent national anthem). The opening ceremony was all about military gestures. The Zapatistas, vulnerable not only as predominantly indigenous people but also as people living in active opposition to the national government, know that they need to be ready.

I focus here on vulnerability not as a condition or state of being but rather as a doing and a relationship of power. The Zapatistas’ vulnerability has been structurally imposed and economically organized from colonial times until the present. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was simply the last straw. But they adapt, they say, “para no dejar de ser” (“in order not to cease to be”) historical beings (“Nosotros”). The bottom line, using John Holloway’s terminology, is that indigenous communities’ “power-to” live, work, and flourish has been under constant attack by the government’s “power-over” their life, work, and well-being (12). How can resistance counter this making vulnerable?

The Zapatista’s political project, I saw for the first time, was not indigenous in form or content; it was the age-old struggle for good government. The entrance to the rebel territory marks the line between two interconnected political systems—both performative, both masked. One, the bad neoliberal government (I agree with the Zapatistas that it is bad), is characterized by violence, corruption, and greed. The other is good in that it examines the basic mechanisms of existing power—power not as a thing one has but as a practice of social relations—and asks, Who exerts the power? Who decides? Who gets left out? They then transform those practices and relationships into their core principles:

• • participatory assemblies: “The people decide.”
  • nondiscrimination: Zapatismo is nonnormative. Although the Zapatistas were long exploited as indígenas, their strategy refuses identity politics, be it ethnic, religious, gender, sexual, class, or linguistic. Their goal, again, is not about being but about doing, about joining the struggle for indigenous rights.

• • collaboration: “Para todos, todo. Para nosotros, nada” (“For everyone, everything. For us, nothing”). Zapatismo values individual rights but acknowledges that individuals cannot do it alone and must exist as part of a collective: “Solos no podemos” (“Alone we can do nothing”).

Resistance here does not mean a rejection of government or a proposed outside to the political. It is a durational performance, and the Zapatistas are masters of the genre. By durational, I mean that the Maya, like many other Native American groups, have weathered attacks for hundreds of years. Durational is also the defining feature of the Zapatista resistance. Many sporadic uprisings and acts of contestation by indigenous peoples take place constantly throughout the Americas—we can think of the Idle No More movement in Canada, the ongoing Mapuche conflict in the southern tip of Chile and Argentina—but the Zapatistas have led an armed uprising and created their own communities and governing structures. Their struggle has eclipsed, as scholars belonging to other Native groups have acknowledged (e.g., Rivera Cusicanqui), other movements both in terms of scale and length of rebellion. The Zapatistas refuse to cede both the mechanics and the idea of state to self-serving political parties (Abrams). They will not be othered. They acknowledge the historical-political causes of their marginalization but manage its effects and affects. The anonymity imposed on them is performed powerfully through their masks; the silencing enforced on them is enacted through their massive silent marches. They call attention to their mask as one more in a complex system of masking, where politicians disguise themselves and their deeds behind imperatives of the state. When delegates from the Mexican government refused to negotiate with the Zapatistas unless they removed their masks, the Zapatistas answered, “But the state is always masked.” At least, the Zapatistas said, the Zapatistas knew that they were masked (Taussig 246).

That the performative force of these gestures resonates nationally and internationally is the only reason most of them are alive today.

Zapatistas have taken over the functions associated with state systems (Abrams 58): health care, education, management of resources, self-defense and control of the territory. They claim the strategy, the proper (propre), the space and time that belong to them, which as de Certeau puts it, “[serve] as the basis for generating relations with an exterior distinct from it” (xix). They decide who enters their territory, when, and under what circumstances. They control the entrances and the exits. Having handed over our papers, we wait for permission to proceed. We are entering their time zone.

Although the struggle to form a good government is not indigenous, the value system through which that struggle takes place most certainly is. Zapatistas inhabit an age-old Mayan system of equivalences, deep-rooted connectivity, and mutual recognition. Human beings, corn, snails, mountains, rain, and all else have their ch’ulel, the animation and interconnectedness of all things, human and nonhuman. A Zapatista who met with me during those days put it this way: “Ch’ulel refers to the life in everything. It’s the presence that constructs and completes everything that exists in the universe and that gives it its importance,” its dignity and “grandeur.” Mesoamericans started developing corn ten thousand years ago, and as a consequence they are the people of corn.

Monsanto wants to grow, not kill, corn, the transnational corporation claims, but it will kill corn’s ch’ulel. Genetically modified corn will become one more dead thing in the capitalist production of dead things. The challenge is “how to create a world based on mutual recognition of human dignity, on the formation of social relations which are not power relations” (Holloway 8). One way has been through the affirmation of an inclusive we, a nosotros that dialogues with other nosotros, other groups of people able to represent themselves. In our meaning-making systems we might imagine this communication as a discussion of occupiers from Occupy Wall Street with other Occupy groups that have organized themselves autonomously.

The caracol, as a social formation, enacts the system of equivalences. The paintings and sayings of each caracol encapsulate an entire worldview. Images of snails, often wearing humorous Zapatista masks, make their way into most of the murals, paintings, and textiles. Not only do the Zapatistas honor the slow and steady pace of the snail, the patience and expenditure required for all doing, but the snail shell serves as the design layout for their communal lands that spiral open from tight administrative centers. The unassuming snail also represents war in the classical Mayan glyphs,2 the war the Maya have long waged against colonial and imperialist masters and now with the bankers of those masters (Chase Manhattan made the elimination of the Zapatistas a precondition for a bailout after the economic disaster precipitated by NAFTA in 1995).3

At the celebration, a woman identified only as a member of the JBG addressed the crowd in Spanish: “Compañeras, compañeros, hermanas y hermanos de la sociedad civil, nacional e internacional” (“Companions, brothers and sisters of the national and international community”).4 Gender parity has been central to the movement even before the Revolutionary Law for Women passed in 1993. This parity is reflected not only in all governing roles, official positions, and educational practices but also in the very language: no word with a masculine ending for a person stands without its feminine counterpart, so hermanas (“sisters”) accompanies hermanos (“brothers”). The compañera from the JBG spoke of the struggles the movement has endured over the years: “It hasn’t been easy, these ten years of practice and building our autonomy. . . . It hasn’t been easy for many reasons, such as the lack of experience or lack of training in governing and self-governing.” But the need for resistance continues, she made clear, confronted as the Zapatistas are by a government that continues to deny them rights and liberty and that wants to take their lands. She said that they continue to learn how to resist and work for democracy, though the fruits of the struggle will not be reaped in their lifetime. She asked people of good heart and goodwill that compose civil society to support their struggle.

Was she referring to us, the visitors?

After the compañera finished speaking, another member of the JBG from another region took the microphone and delivered the same speech in Tzeltal. When he was done, another delivered it in Tzotzil. The speeches seemed interminable to me in the downpour, and I looked down at my ruined shoes in dismay.

Soon the speeches were over, and the flags were marched ceremoniously out of the central space. The next few minutes were all “¡Viva!,” “Long live the Escuelita Zapatista!,” “Long live national and international civil society!,” “Viva the grassroots communities!,” “¡Viva el subcomandante insurgente Marcos!,” “¡Viva el subcomandante insurgente Moysés!,” “¡Viva el comite clandestino revolucionario indígena!” (“Viva the clandestine indigenous revolutionary committee!”), “¡Viva el Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional!,” “¡Viva Chiapas!,” “¡Viva México!” The vivas got louder and louder. Joyous music started up and was followed by clapping. Soon all the representatives had marched off the podium, a long line of women and men walking single file, one after another, in their fine indigenous clothing. They moved quickly, though formally, through the pouring rain up the long road to the entrance of the caracol. The music, very tinny and brassy corridos (“ballads”) set to polka-type beats, sang of heroic opponents to bad governments.

Then music came on over the speakers and an emcee called people onto the basketball court, now a dance floor. Couples came forward with black plastic tarps over their heads, ski masks covering their faces, and moved slowly, rhythmically to the music. The people I had come with joined in, dancing raucously and happily in the company.

To return to the Zapatista’s question: What were we doing there? Were we tourists? Maybe some of us there were wannabe revolutionaries. Another way to put it is that the party brought together a broad range of people, many of them from other activist networks and grassroots movements. Those accepting Moises’s invitation became a WE by attending.5 This performative gesture initiated a dialogue among these WE, a dialogue that protected the Zapatistas from extermination but that inspired us as well. Activists from decolonial, antiglobalization, environmental, and other movements continue to be inspired by the Zapatistas. WE also serves as a vital addition, a third part, to the binary established by the good and bad governments, in the creation of the civil society that determines who lives and who dies. Systems produce vulnerability, and other systems, networks, and equivalencies can be mobilized to offset some of the debilitating effects and affects. I came to “listen and learn,” as Subcomandante Marcos good-naturedly asked of us (Subcomandante Marcos), but I know too how much I have to unlearn in order to listen.

The rain, the mud, the poverty does not seem to quell or diminish the pride or determination of the Zapatistas. According to accounts they cite, Zapatista communities have achieved higher standards of health and education than other indigenous communities in Mexico. But Chiapas is still, twenty years after the uprising, one of the poorest states in the nation. It has more inequality now than then and higher rates of illiteracy (Ríos). Carlos Monsiváis, writing as he accompanied the Zapatistas on their 2001 march for dignity, noted that given the discrimination in Mexico, the obvious and indisputable call for education, food, health, and land seems utopian.6 The more the Zapatistas move forward, the farther the ideals of social justice seem to get away from them. But they keep moving. My experience in the caracol near San Cristobal de las Casas suggests to me that the sense of dignity palpable in the Zapatistas offsets many hardships. As they showed us, they make their own decisions and rules. Those who seek to interact with them need to abide by those decisions and rules. When the Zapatistas allow or invite us to enter their territory, they are hoping that we will act as witnesses and transmitters of their existence, their resistance, and their worldview. I say worldview rather than ideology because they are pragmatists, not ideologues. The evening celebration demonstrated that all indigenous peoples committed to resistance against bad government are welcome, regardless of the religious, linguistic, and regional tensions that often separate groups. Indigenous Catholics, Evangelicals, and even Muslims may fight one another throughout the state, but here they danced together.

And all night and throughout the week, the Mexican air force buzzed the caracoles, just in case we had forgotten that they could.

(Painted on the wall in Oventic, Chiapas)

Avanzo un metro, se aleja un metro

Avanzo dos metros, se aleja dos metros

Avanzo diez metros, se aleja diez metros

Sé que nunca lo alcanzaré

Sé que es una utopía

Que es un sueño

Entonces…

¿Para qué sirven, los sueños, las utopías?

¡Para avanzar!

 

I advance a meter and it advances a meter

I advance two meters, and it advances two meters.

I advance ten meters, and it advances ten meters

I know I will never catch up

I know it’s a utopia

That it’s a dream

So

What good are dreams? utopias?

To keep us advancing! (my trans.)

Notes

This essay is dedicated to José Esteban Muñoz, friend, colleague, and a cruiser of utopias.

1. The Zapatista Web site is http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/2013/03/17/fechas-y-otras-cosas-para-la-escuelita-zapatista/. For more background information on the Zapatista movement, see Womack; Saldaña-Portillo. ↩

2. Stross notes the importance of the land and water snails in Mayan glyphs and the significance in their association with the earth and also with war: “Because both land snails and water snails are found in the Maya area and have different names, one cannot be sure whether we are dealing with the snail as earth or as underworld, but the ‘war’ expression probably indicates a land snail” (105). ↩

3. “The [Mexican] government will need to eliminate the Zapatistas to demonstrate [its] effective control of the national territory and of security policy” (Roett). ↩

4. I translated this statement from a video of the event; see also Gil and Mandujano. ↩

5. The Zapatistas and the artists working with them refer to these collectivities as WE. ↩

6. “Reconocimiento de los derechos a la educación, la vivienda, la salud, la tierra (a fuerza de discriminación, lo obvio, lo indiscutible, se vuelvo lo utópico)” (34). ↩

Works Cited

Abrams, Philip. “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State.” 1977. Journal of Historical Sociology 1.1 (1988): 58–89. Print.

Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Randall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. Print.

“Fechas y otras cosas para la escuelita zapatista.” Enlace Zapatista. Enlace Zapatista, n.d. Web. 21 Feb. 2014.

Gil, José, and Isaín Mandujano. “Una década de caracoles.” Proceso 25 Aug. 2013: 34–36. Print.

Holloway, John. Change the World without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today. London: Pluto, 2002. Print.

Monsiváis, Carlos. EZLN: Documentos y comunicados 5. Círculo Ometeotl. Círculo Ometeotl, 2000–01. Web. 22 Feb. 2014. Colección problemas de México.

Morris, Walter. A Textile Guide to the Highlands of Chiapas / Guia textil de los altos de Chiapas. Chicago: Independent Publishers Group, 2012. Print.

“Nosotros: Interview with a Zapatista.” Interview by Diana Taylor and Jacques Servan. San Cristobal de las Casas, Aug. 2013.

El otro jugador: La caravana de la dignidad indígena. Ed. Ramón Vera Herrera. Mexico: La Jornada, 2001. Print.

Ríos, Viridiana. “Chiapas, peor que ayer.” Nexos. Nexos, 1 Jan. 2014. Web. 22 Feb. 2014.

Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia. “Micropolítica y zonas de autonomía en los Andes.” Andrés Bello Chair Lecture, King Juan Carlos of Spain Center, New York U, Feb. 2014. Address.

Roett, Riordan. “The Chase Manhattan Memo—Feb 9, 1995.” New Stuff. The Thing, n.d. Web. 3 Mar. 2014.

Saldaña-Portillo, María Josefina. The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age of Development. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. Print.

San Andres Accords, January 18, 1996. Trans. Rosalva Bermudez-Ballin. The Struggle Site. Flag.blackened.net, n.d. Web. 21 Feb. 2014.

Scott, James C. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale UP, 1990. Print.

Stross, Brian. “Classical Maya Directional Glyphs.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 1.1 (1991): 97–114. University of Texas. Web. 22 Feb. 2014. <http://www.utexas.edu/courses/stross/papers/DirectionalGlyphs.pdf>.

Subcomandante Marcos. “Malas y no tan malas noticias.” Enlace Zapatista. Enlace Zapatista, Nov. 2013. Web. 26 Feb. 2014. <http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/2013/11/03/malas-y-no-tan-malas-noticias/>.

Taussig, Michael. Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999. Print.

Womack, John, Jr. Rebellion in Chiapas: A Historical Reader. New York: New, 1999. Print.

Diana Taylor is University Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at New York University. A version of this paper was presented at the 2014 MLA convention in Chicago.

Posted March 2014

I want to approach the question of vulnerability from the perspective of two of the greatest crises of our time: the environmental crisis and the inequality crisis. And I want to do so under the sign of the Anthropocene. Why the Anthropocene? After Eugene Stoermer, an ecologist, and Paul Crutzen, an atmospheric chemist, advanced the term in 2000 (Crutzen and Stoermer), it gave rise to an ascendant planetary story that has become influential across a panoply of disciplines. Now, in the twenty-first century’s second decade, we are witnessing the advent of the public Anthropocene, as the idea moves beyond academic journals and conferences and into museums, galleries, radio programs, and trade publications. For those of us in the environmental humanities, this development represents a critical opportunity to reflect on—and help shape—the direction of this public Anthropocene turn.

Stories matter—they matter immeasurably. Measurement, data, metrics, and modeling are the lucrative priorities of universities these days. In the face of this pressure to quantify, it is easy for humanities scholars to lose track of what they do best, like explaining why telling a story one way as opposed to another can have profound imaginative, ethical, and political consequences. In a world drowning in data, stories can play a vital role—for example, in the making of environmental publics and in the shaping of environmental policy.

I focus here on the question of how vulnerability is perceived and distributed under the sign of the Anthropocene. For a growing chorus of scientists, the Holocene is history: human beings, through their own actions, have jolted the planet into a new, unprecedented epoch and left the Holocene behind. For the first time in Earth’s history, a sentient species, Homo sapiens, has become a geomorphic force, an exceptional actor in the planet’s geophysical systems. According to the dominant Anthropocene script, collectively over the past two and a half centuries—since the onset of the Industrial Revolution—people have been laying down in stone a durable geological archive of human impacts. To reimagine humanity in this way, not just as a biological but also a geological force, means in the words of one paleontologist, Anthony Barnosky, that “we are the asteroid” (qtd. in “Leaving”).

In Nigel Clark’s phrase, the story of the Anthropocene links “earthly volatility” to “bodily vulnerability” (xx). But I would argue that the most influential Anthropocene intellectuals have sidestepped the question of unequal human agency, unequal human impacts, and unequal human vulnerabilities. If, by contrast, we take an environmental justice approach to Anthropocene storytelling, we can better acknowledge the way the geomorphic powers of human beings have involved unequal exposure to risk and unequal access to resources. In 2013, the world’s eighty-five richest people—a group small enough to fit into a double-decker bus, in the unlikely event that they would be inclined to take a bus—had a net worth equal to that of fifty percent of the planet’s population, the 3.5 billion poorest people (Wearden). To take a longer view on disparity, since 1751, a period that encompasses the entire Anthropocene to date, a mere ninety corporations, primarily oil and coal companies, have generated two-thirds of humanity’s CO₂ emissions. That’s a very high concentration of earth-altering power.

A crucial imaginative challenge facing us is this: How do we tell two large stories that seem in tension with each other, a convergent story and a divergent one? Set against the collective story about humanity’s geomorphic impacts that will be legible in the earth’s geophysical systems for millennia to come is the story of the human species, a much more fractured narrative. The species-centered Anthropocene meme has arisen in the twenty-first century, a period in which most societies have experienced a deepening schism between the überrich and the ultrapoor. In terms of the history of ideas, what does it mean that the Anthropocene as a grand explanatory species story has taken hold during a plutocratic age? How can we counter the centripetal force of that dominant story with centrifugal stories that acknowledge immense disparities in human agency, impacts, and vulnerability?

Most Anthropocene scholars date the new epoch to the late-eighteenth-century beginnings of industrialization. But there is a second phase to the Anthropocene, the so-called great acceleration, beginning circa 1950: an exponential increase in human-induced changes to the carbon cycle and nitrogen cycle and in ocean acidification, global trade, and consumerism, as well as the rise of international forms of governance like the World Bank and the IMF.

However, most accounts of the great acceleration fail to position it in relation to neoliberalism’s recent ascent, although most of the great acceleration has occurred during the neoliberal era. One marker of neoliberalism has been a widening chasm of inequality between the superrich and the ultrapoor: since the late 1970s, we have been living through what Timothy Noah calls “the great divergence.” Noah’s subject is the economic fracturing of America, the new American gilded age, but the great divergence has scarred most societies, from China and India to Indonesia, South Africa, Nigeria, Italy, Spain, Ireland, Costa Rica, Jamaica, Australia, and Bangladesh.

My central problem with the dominant mode of Anthropocene storytelling is its failure to articulate the great acceleration to the great divergence. We need to acknowledge that the grand species narrative of the Anthropocene—this geomorphic “age of the human”—is gaining credence at a time when, in society after society, the idea of the human is breaking apart economically, as the distance between affluence and abandonment is increasing. It is time to remold the Anthropocene as a shared story about unshared resources. When we examine the geology of the human, let us also pay attention to the geopolitics of the new stratigraphy’s layered assumptions.

Neoliberalism loves watery metaphors: the trickle-down effect, global flows, how a rising tide lifts all boats. But talk of a rising tide raises other specters: the coastal poor, who will never get storm-surge barriers; Pacific Islanders in the front lines of inundation; Arctic peoples, whose livelihoods are melting away—all of them exposed to the fallout from Anthropocene histories of carbon extraction and consumption in which they played virtually no part.

There is a profound need for concerted action to secure a viable planetary future, and the Anthropocene idea might contribute to that action by disturbing widespread assumptions about human agency, environmental time, and planetary destiny. But let’s not pretend that we’re all in this boat together—unless the boat in question is some twenty-first-century reconstruction of the vessel that stars in Garrett Hardin’s 1974 parable on lifeboat ethics, in which the comfortable minority in the boat ponder how many of the drowning masses they can afford to take on board. As the Anthropocene story leaves academe and enters the popular domain, as we witness the current turn toward the public Anthropocene in museums and galleries and blogs, let’s make sure this story isn’t told only from the perspective of the comfortable, of those already in the boat. Otherwise, we’ll be complicit in a kind of Anthropocene lifeboat ethics that is enabled by a spurious species narrative and predicated on the privatization of survival. We need to speak out against adaptation by the rich for the rich, while humanity at large is left to flounder in waters made increasingly choppy by climate change and by the rising incidence of what insurance brokers call “extreme convective events.”

In Anthropocene metrics and modeling, we are seeing considerable attention directed at what kind of stratigraphic record drowned megacities will leave. As those cities are emerging today, they are distinguished less by trickle-down effects than by the walling off of resources and by splintering urbanism (Graham and Marvin), where those whom Ivan Vladislavić calls “the well-heeled” and “the well-wheeled” withdraw into semicelestial enclaves of vertical and horizontal segregation (155). In Mumbai, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Lagos, Johannesburg, Jakarta, São Paolo, Madrid, Shanghai, and beyond, clients clamor for up-to-the-minute fortress design, new ways to wall off, as elegantly as possible, the possessors from the dispossessed. In megacities, defensive architecture rises ever higher alongside indefensible inequities. All this injustice will be legible in the Anthropocene’s stratigraphic record for millennia to come, this Dickensian tale of two cities, one built from enduring materials, the other from improvised, impermanent scraps.

As I speak, another CEO takes to the air in his golden parachute, soaring above the planet of the slums. The distance between his gleaming parachute and the favela below poses a political challenge that is imaginative as well, for such distance intensifies the urgency of finding inventive, bridging testimony. As the Anthropocene goes public, we need stories that bear witness to the great divergence, stories that expose and oppose the divides segregating the plush plutocrats from the disposable people left to languish in the great acceleration’s vast shadowlands.

Works Cited

Clark, Nigel. Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet. Los Angeles: Sage, 2011. Print.

Crutzen, Paul, and Eugene Stoermer. “The Anthropocene.” Global Change Newsletter 41 (2000): 17–18. Print.

Graham, Steve, and Simon Marvin. Splintering Urbanism. New York: Routledge, 2001. Print.

Hardin, Garrett. “Commentary: Living on a Lifeboat.” Bioscience 24.10 (1974): 561–68. Print.

“Leaving Our Mark: What Will Be Left of Our Cities?” BBC News. BBC, 31 Oct. 2012. Web. 11 Mar. 2014.

Noah, Timothy. The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do about It. New York: Bloomsbury, 2012. Print.

Vladislavić, Ivan. Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked. London: Portobello, 2007. Print.

Wearden, Graeme. “Oxfam: Eighty-Five Richest People as Wealthy as Poorest Half of World.” Guardian. Guardian News and Media Ltd., 20 Jan. 2014. Web. 11 Mar. 2014. <http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/jan/20/oxfam-85-richest-people-half-of-the-world>.

Rob Nixon is the Rachel Carson and Elizabeth Ritzmann Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. A version of this paper was presented at the 2014 MLA convention in Chicago.

Posted March 2014

My remarks on vulnerable times are drawn from my forthcoming book, “Reparations and the Human,” which explores the politics of reparations, the human, and human rights in the context of Cold War Asia. The project is interdisciplinary: reparation is a key term in political theory, but it is also a central concept in psychoanalysis—in particular, object relations—though the two are rarely discussed together. The book investigates how political and psychic genealogies of reparation might supplement each other in the wake of changing conceptions of the human being after genocide and nuclear holocaust. I examine the concepts’ transnational significance in relation to a trans-Pacific archive. I bring together three interlocking events of World War II as well as their Cold War legacies and effects: first, the internment of Japanese Americans by the United States government during World War II; second, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which ended that war; and, third, contemporary legal claims by comfort women, girls and women conscripted by Japan’s imperial army into sexual slavery.

This essay derives from the afterword to my book, which investigates the history of uranium mining. Most of the world’s uranium supply is mined from indigenous lands. The uranium sourced for the creation of Little Boy, the atomic bomb detonated over Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 by the United States military, was no exception: it was extracted in part from the lands of the Dene, an indigenous people inhabiting the Sahtu Region in the Northwest Territories of Canada.1 Many of the Sahtu Dene men who labored on behalf of this atomic initiative died of cancer (Nikiforuk). Their families and descendants all suffer from exorbitant rates of malignancy. The water and land on which the Sahtu Dene live are poisoned for tens of thousands of years. Ignorant at the time of how their mining efforts would be applied and of the destination of the ore, the Sahtu Dene nonetheless felt implicated once they learned of Hiroshima’s fate. In response to the atomic disaster, they sent a delegation to Hiroshima to apologize.

I would like to focus on this act of apology, which is recounted in Peter Blow’s 1999 documentary Village of Widows: The Story of the Sahtu Dene and the Atomic Bomb. The first half of Blow’s film relates the suffering of the Sahtu Dene and their failed attempts to gain either acknowledgment or relief from the Canadian government for what environmental scholars describe as new forms of “toxic” or “radioactive colonialism” in the atomic age (Masco 34; see also Kultez; Pasternak). The second half of the documentary follows the delegation’s journey to Japan. There, the Sahtu Dene group attends ceremonies at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park marking the anniversary of the bombing; they apologize to a group of community leaders for their role in the atomic disaster; and they visit a hospital devoted exclusively to Korean hibakusha (“survivors of the atomic bombing”), conscripted laborers from Japan’s colonial empire in East and Southeast Asia forced to work as part of the city’s enormous military industrial complex at the time of the bombing.

Building on Jacques Derrida’s notion of “absolute forgiveness,” I develop a corollary concept of absolute apology. In On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, Derrida offers a counterintuitive notion of forgiveness, suggesting that the only thing worth forgiving is, in fact, the unforgivable.2 On the one hand, he suggests that what can be forgiven—what can be pardoned—is invariably tied to political calculation, to a set of intended political consequences and effects. For example, a perpetrator apologizes, and a victim, in the face of this performative demand, is inserted in a dialectic of apology and forgiveness, reparation and reconciliation, a dialectic that serves to underwrite narratives of progress and justice. “The language of forgiveness, at the service of determined finalities,” Derrida observes, is “anything but pure and disinterested. As always in the field of politics” (31). Reparation in this instance functions as a noun—as a political accounting of injury and harm, as a definitive moment of recognition and redress, and as a distinct event that writes a history of violence into the past. This perspective supports a history of reparations in political theory.

On the other hand, to forgive the unforgivable—to forgive in the absence of apology and political demand—shatters such narratives of completion and unity. The calculability of politics thus cleaves to the incalculability of justice. “Forgiveness is not, it should not be, normal, normative, normalizing,” Derrida writes. “It should remain exceptional and extraordinary, in the face of the impossible: as if it interrupted the ordinary course of historical temporality” (32). Dissociating forgiveness from apology, victim from perpetrator, and justice from law, absolute forgiveness functions outside the circuits of sovereign power, authority, and will. In the end, it indexes a “madness of the impossible,” he concludes. “It is even, perhaps, the only thing that arrives, that surprises, like a revolution, the ordinary course of history, politics, and law. Because that means that it remains heterogenous to the order of politics or of the juridical as they are ordinarily understood” (39).

If, as Derrida suggests, absolute forgiveness demands forgiving that which is unforgivable, I would propose that absolute apology involves apologizing for that which you are not (quite) responsible. The Sahtu Dene’s surprising act of apology interrupts, like uranium itself, the ordinary course of things. Dispossessed of their land through a long history of colonial settlement, targeted by enormous state violence and neglect, and suffering from unspeakable personal losses and long-term environmental devastation, the Sahtu Dene nonetheless apologize. They voluntarily assume the mantle of perpetrator and thus take responsibility for their role in the atomic disaster, for a violence that claims them as much as any other. What is at stake when those who might be considered the most vulnerable—the most dispossessed and victimized—in a long history of colonial violence nonetheless assume the mantle of perpetrator?

The Sahtu Dene, by cleaving to the victims of the atomic bombing, assent to a notion of history, to cite Cathy Caruth, as a phenomenon of being “implicated in each other’s traumas” (24). From another perspective, their act of apology blurs the line between victim and perpetrator. Indeed, it illustrates how one might be victim and perpetrator at once, and it illustrates the ethical stakes of claiming such a position. Those stakes are high, for the Sahtu Dene’s apology presents us with a different notion of responsibility and repair, one in which we must take account of, as well as respond to, events beyond clear notions of agency and will, linear concepts of cause and effect, and even the immediate consequences and results of decisions clearly made by others.3

In demonstrating how violence and responsibility are dissociated from conventional politics of reparation and reconciliation, the Sahtu Dene’s act works to loosen the dialectic of apology and forgiveness—perpetrator and victim—on which legal claims for reparations and human rights are typically predicated. I see the value of the Sahtu Dene’s apology as an ethical ideal at the very limits of the political, indexing “a madness of the impossible.” At the same time, I see the value of their act as a performative, pedagogical moment in which to imagine otherwise a politics of reparation, the human, and human rights. After all, legal claims for reparations and human rights are based on trauma not as a shared phenomenon, in which we are all implicated, but rather as a psychic injury arrogated by one group over another in the calculated politics of victimhood and recognition. If trauma is a thing to be monopolized in conventional understandings of reparations and human rights, the Sahtu Dene’s gesture underscores a notion of repair that encompasses not ownership but rather, in Peter van Wyck’s words, the “infinite character of responsibility” (172). It is an acknowledgment not of sovereign inviolability but of a common vulnerability, an unwilled susceptibility that connects all creatures and things.

Vulnerability from this perspective is neither victimhood nor weakness, as Marianne Hirsch suggests in her statement for this forum. In its embrace of responsibility, vulnerability is not opposed to agency either, emerging instead as a kind of ethical act. This is an act of solidarity, an act of acknowledgment and responsiveness toward unwilled others who have been harmed.

I conclude by suggesting that the history of uranium mining and toxic colonialism to which the Sahtu Dene respond has great resonance with recent scholarship on the Anthropocene and the radically uneven effects of environmental justice movements. Indeed, the story of the Sahtu Dene and the atomic bomb precludes, as Rob Nixon so incisively suggests in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, any temporal possibility of the post- in postcolonial (8). Moreover, it draws disconnected groups across the trans-Pacific into unexpected alignment. It offers, that is, a different narrative of the atomic bombing of Japan and the postwar politics of reparation after nuclear holocaust by connecting a longer history of Native dispossession in the New World with more recent colonial violence and militarism in Cold War Asia. I take these ideas of unanticipated solidarity, of slow violence and the temporal impossibility of the post-, as ones that shatter concepts of sovereignty and sovereign time, transporting us instead into the framework of vulnerable times.

If, as Elizabeth V. Spelman suggests, we repair only what is valuable to us, the Sahtu Dene’s apology marks a kind of unexpected receptivity and openness to the pain of the enemy, to the vulnerability of the devalued other (8). From this perspective, we might say it is those to whom repair can be offered who become the very sign of the human. The Sahtu Dene’s absolute apology, as well as Blow’s recounting of it in Village of Widows, offers an important insight not just into the political but also into the aesthetic. Despite their fictional nature, film and literature seek to represent yet can never definitively capture the role of either victim or perpetrator. In their proximity to the imaginary, they intersect with the logic of absolute apology, which blurs the line between victim and perpetrator as two entrenched positions. If, as I mentioned earlier, we think of reparation in political theory more as a noun—as a discrete historical event and definitive legal accounting of the past in the name of victims and perpetrators—in the conceptual grammar of psychoanalysis reparation functions more as a verb, as a continuous process of violence and repair subtending the subjective vicissitudes of love and hate that demand the constant retelling of their affective vagaries. Together with the imaginary peregrinations of the aesthetic, reparation as a verb thus facilitates new constellations of the injured to emerge and new atrocities to be apprehended. Such continuous openings of the future for the past might be described as vulnerability in process, another way to think about the political and social emergencies of vulnerable times.

Notes

1. In 2009, the worldwide production of uranium amounted to 50,572 tons. Kazakhstan, Canada, and Australia are the top three producers. Together, the three countries account for sixty-three percent of the world’s uranium production. Other important uranium producers are Namibia, Russia, Niger, Uzbekistan, and the United States. Each country produces over a thousand tons per year (see “Uranium Mining”). The uranium for the Manhattan Project, which constructed the two atomic bombs detonated over Japan, came from northwest Canada, the United States (the Colorado Plateau), and the Belgian Congo (see “Manhattan Project”). ↩

2. Derrida writes: “In order to approach now the very concept of forgiveness, logic and common sense agree for once with the paradox: it is necessary, it seems to me, to begin from the fact that, yes, there is the unforgivable. It this not, in truth, the only thing to forgive? The only thing that calls for forgiveness? If one is only prepared to forgive what appears forgivable, what the church calls ‘venal sin,’ then the very idea of forgiveness would disappear” (32). ↩

3. I derive this reading from Judith Butler’s Parting Ways. Commenting on Emmanuel Lévinas, Butler writes, “We do not take responsibility for the Other’s suffering only when it is clear that we have caused that suffering. In other words, we do not take responsibility only for the clear choices we have made and the effects they have had. Although, of course, such acts are important components of any account of responsibility, they do not indicate its most fundamental structure. According to Levinas, we affirm the unfreedom at the heart of our relations with others, and only by ceding in this way do we come to understand responsibility. In other words, I cannot disavow my relation to the Other, regardless of what the other does, regardless of what I might will. Indeed, responsibility is not a matter of cultivating a will (as it is for Kantians), but of recognizing an unwilled susceptibility as a resource for being responsive to the Other” (43). ↩

Works Cited

Butler, Judith. Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism. New York: Columbia UP, 2013. Print.

Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Print.

Derrida, Jacques. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes. New York: Routledge, 1991. Print.

Kultez, Valerie L. The Tainted Desert: Environmental Ruin in the American West. New York: Routledge, 1998. Print.

“Manhattan Project.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia, n.d. Web. 25 Feb. 2014.

Masco, Joseph. The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006. Print.

Nikiforuk, Andrew. “Echoes of the Atomic Age.” Calgary Herald 14 Mar. 1998: n. pag. Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility. Web. 25 Feb. 2014.

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2011. Print.

Pasternak, Judy. Yellow Dirt: An American Story of a Poisoned Land and People Betrayed. New York: Free, 2010. Print.

Spelman, Elizabeth V. Repair: The Impulse to Restore in a Fragile World. Boston: Beacon, 2003. Print.

“Uranium Mining.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia, n.d. Web. 25 Feb. 2014.

van Wyck, Peter C. “An Emphatic Geography: Notes on the Ethical Itinerary of Landscape.” Canadian Journal of Communication 33 (2008): 171–91. Print.

Village of Widows: The Story of the Sahtu Dene and the Atomic Bomb. Dir. Peter Blow. Lindum Films, 1999. Film.

David L. Eng is Richard L. Fisher Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. A version of this paper was presented at the 2014 MLA convention in Chicago.

Posted March 2014

When I proposed the theme “Vulnerable Times” for the 2014 convention, it was my hope that the idea of vulnerability, and of vulnerable times in particular, would pull together a number of strands. I was thinking of multiple dimensions of vulnerability and hoping to consider them together with colleagues in fields both contiguous to and far removed from my own. I had no idea, however, that the response to an invitation to join this conversation would be so overwhelming. Nearly two hundred of the eight hundred convention sessions were connected to the theme, and they ranged across numerous divisions, discussion groups, allied organizations, and special sessions, across histories, geographies, and subfields.

During 2014, Profession will publish the presentations from four of these sessions: the Presidential Forum, “Trauma, Memory, Vulnerability,” “Public Humanities,” and “The Politics of Language in Vulnerable Times.”

The theme of vulnerable times addresses vulnerabilities of life, of the planet, and of our professional disciplines now and throughout history. Its aim is to illuminate ensuing acts of imagination and forms of resistance that promote social change. My own interest in vulnerability derives from my long-standing feminist work on lives that are marginalized, forgotten, or omitted from dominant histories and narratives. It also emerges from a concern about the precarious place of education, particularly languages, the humanities, and the arts, as a local and global priority in the present moment. And it develops from a commitment to mobilize and promote the textual, historical, theoretical, and activist work that we do in the framework of the MLA in broader social and political platforms.

Vulnerability and its twin notion, resilience, are widely used in the fields of environment, social ecology, political economy, medicine, and developmental psychology to study the predisposition of people and systems to injury and their ability to recover from shocks and unwelcome surprises. Feminist theorists acknowledge the vulnerabilities we share as an embodied species but have also underlined the differentially imposed and socially manufactured vulnerabilities faced by marginalized groups throughout history. They have seen vulnerability—both shared and differentially inflicted—not as weakness or victimhood but as a space for engagement and resistance emerging from a sense of fundamental interdependence and solidarity. Conscious of some of the pitfalls that follow from a claim to vulnerability, they have nevertheless used this claim to imagine and to demand social and political institutions that will lessen injury.

This collected discussion of vulnerable times aims to contribute literary and humanistic perspectives to our interdisciplinary engagements. It looks to the temporalities that follow from an acknowledgment of vulnerability and asks how different historical moments and different cultural contexts have attempted to avert catastrophe by envisioning alternative futures. It aims to reframe dominant narratives of power and powerlessness, perpetration and victimhood, reimagining them, as Rob Nixon suggests, from the perspectives of the vulnerable.

The contributions to the forum share several assumptions about vulnerability: the conviction that it is historically specific; that it is differentially distributed; that it goes beyond the human to other species and life-forms; and that it is not a stigma or weakness but a space of connection that, if acknowledged, can generate an ethics and politics of openness, attunement, and resistance. Thus Judith Butler, looking at the well-known photograph of the woman in a red dress from the 2013 Gezi Park protests in Istanbul, asks whether vulnerability can be mobilized as a form of agency. The woman in the red dress is only one of several striking images of creative response in the face of what Ariella Azoulay calls “regime-made disaster.” These responses in no way diminish the violence that elicited them, but they do illustrate how vulnerability can become resistance. Azoulay’s paper urges us to refuse an all too common equation: if some people are made vulnerable, it is because others have accepted being made perpetrators. But, she asks, what if we were to claim a fundamental right not to become perpetrators? Or what, in David Eng’s terms, does it mean to apologize for an act for which one is not directly responsible but in which one is implicated? It means to assume responsibility for the unintended consequences of one’s actions, thus engaging in an “unanticipated solidarity” of the vulnerable—the solidarity, in this case, of the Sahtu Dene, an impoverished indigenous group in northwest Canada who mined the uranium used to manufacture the bomb, and of the bomb’s victims in Hiroshima. We see this solidarity also in Diana Taylor’s dance with the Zapatistas and in the Mayan idea of ch’ulel—the interconnectedness of all life-forms—that sustains this utterly vulnerable and yet powerfully resilient group. Claiming vulnerability as a space from which to begin rather than as a stigma to overcome, the forum papers take us to disparate and unexpected sites, all interconnected by the commitment to the tough, incisive, and activist analysis that distinguishes the humanities in vulnerable times.

Marianne Hirsch is William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. A version of this paper was presented at the 2014 MLA convention in Chicago.

Posted March 2014

Thinking about vulnerability and thinking about it together on this occasion are both notoriously difficult things to do. Is our thinking about vulnerability together a merely contingent fact, or is there something about vulnerability that becomes understandable only when we understand it as social relation? Does vulnerability not implicate us as social creatures who are vulnerable in relation to one another and vulnerable also by virtue of the social structures and institutions, ecological networks, and biopolitical regulations on which we depend for our persistence and well-being?

It seems that to speak about this topic requires speaking about the resistance to speaking about this topic. There are those who worry that vulnerability, if it becomes a theme or a problem for thinking, will be asserted as a primary existential condition, ontological and constitutive, and that this sort of foundationalism will founder on the same rocky shores as have others, such as the ethics of care or maternal thinking. Does a turn to vulnerability seek to reintroduce into public discourse those particular modalities of thinking and valuing? Is it smuggling in discounted paradigms for reconsideration?

The resistance to vulnerability is also sometimes based on political grounds. After all, if women or minorities seek to establish themselves as vulnerable, do they unwittingly or wittingly seek to establish a protected status, subject to a paternalistic set of powers that must safeguard the vulnerable—that is, those presumed to be weak and in need of protection? Does the discourse of vulnerability discount the political agency of the subjugated? So one question that emerges from any such discussion is whether the discourse on vulnerability shores up paternalistic power, relegating the condition of vulnerability to those who suffer discrimination, exploitation, or violence. What about the power of those who are oppressed? And what about the vulnerability of paternalistic institutions themselves? After all, if they can be contested, brought down, or rebuilt on egalitarian grounds, then paternalism is vulnerable to a dismantling of its power. And when this dismantling is undertaken by subjugated peoples, do they not establish themselves as something other than, or more than, vulnerable? Indeed, do we want to say that they overcome their vulnerability at such moments, which is to assume that vulnerability is negated when it converts into agency? Or is vulnerability still there, now assuming a different form?

Finally, there are political objections to dominant groups who claim to be vulnerable. In California, when white people were losing their status as a majority, some of them claimed that they were a vulnerable population. Colonial states have lamented their vulnerability to attack by those they colonize and sought general sympathy on the basis of that claim. Some men have complained that feminism has made them into a vulnerable population and that they are now targeted for discrimination. Various European national identities now claim to be under attack by new immigrant communities. We can see that the term vulnerable has a way of shifting, and since we may not like some or even many of the shifts it makes, we may find ourselves awkwardly opposed to vulnerability. Of course, that is a rather funny thing to say, since we might conjecture that any amount of opposition to vulnerability does not exactly defeat its operation in our bodily and social lives.

When we oppose vulnerability as a political term, is it because we would like to see ourselves as agentic or think that better political consequences will follow if we are that way? If we oppose vulnerability in the name of agency, does that imply that we prefer to see ourselves as acting instead of being acted upon? And how might we then describe those regions of both aesthetics and ethics that consider that our receptivity is bound up with our responsiveness, that we are acted upon by what we also act upon at the same time? Does the opposition to vulnerability also imperil a host of related terms of responsiveness, including impressionability, susceptibility, injurability, openness, indignation, outrage, and even resistance? If nothing acts upon me against my will or without my advanced knowledge, then there is only sovereignty, the posture of control over the property that I have and that I am, a seemingly sturdy and self-centered form of the thinking I that cloaks those fault lines in the self that cannot be overcome. What form of politics is supported by this adamant disavowal?

So perhaps I have made some preliminary headway into thinking about the resistance to vulnerability. There is a dual relation to resistance that helps us understand what we mean by vulnerability. On the one hand, there is a resistance to vulnerability that takes both psychic and political dimensions; on the other hand, vulnerability changes its meaning when it becomes understood as part of the practice of political resistance.1 There are, I argue, forms of political resistance that rely fundamentally on the mobilization of vulnerability, and these are very different from political notions that establish agency as the opposite of vulnerability—that is, as something that requires or induces the vanquishing of vulnerability, or its full conversion into its ostensible opposite.

Quite apart from the psychological resistance to vulnerability, there are legitimate political criticisms of some of the appropriations of vulnerability, most notably, (a) paternalism and the reification of certain populations as definitionally “vulnerable”—a move that risks making lack of power into an enduring condition for those populations and (b) the cynical inversion of relations of power, such that those who are dominant claim to be unacceptably vulnerable to those who seek equality, democracy, the end of colonialism, or reparation for past injuries. In my view, it will not do to embrace vulnerability or get in touch with our feelings or bare our fault lines as if that would launch a new mode of authenticity or inaugurate a new order of moral values. I am not in favor of such a move, since it would continue to locate vulnerability as the opposite of agency and to identify agency with sovereign modes of defensiveness. It ratifies the logic that understands the two as mutually exclusive and restrictively defined within that binary frame. Rather, I am proposing that once we see how vulnerability enters into agency, then our understanding of both terms can change. This change can happen if we reflect on forms of political resistance that depend upon the mobilization of vulnerability.

Vulnerability, however, is not a subjective disposition but a relation to a field of objects, forces, and passions that impinge upon or affect us in some way. As a way of being related to what is not me and not fully masterable, vulnerability is a kind of relationship that belongs to that ambiguous region in which receptivity and responsiveness are not clearly separable from each other, and not distinguished as separate moments in a sequence.

I am aware that I have used resistance in at least two ways: first, as the resistance to vulnerability that characterizes thinking that models itself on mastery; second, as a social and political form that is informed by vulnerability and is therefore not one of its opposites. Vulnerability is neither fully passive nor fully active but operates in a middle region if not a middle voice (White). I think about those practices of deliberate exposure to police or military violence in which bodies, put on the line, either receive blows or seek to stop violence as living blockades or barriers. In such practices of nonviolent resistance, we can come to understand bodily vulnerability as something that is actually marshaled or mobilized for the purpose of resistance. Such a claim is controversial, since this exposure can seem allied with self-destruction, but what interests me is the kind of nonviolent resistance that mobilizes vulnerability in order to assert existence, the right to public space, and equality and to oppose police, security, and military violence. We may think that these are isolated moments when a group decides in advance to produce a blockade or to link arms in order to lay claim to public space or to resist being removed by the police. And that is surely true, as it was in Berkeley in 2011, when a group of students and faculty members were assaulted by campus police as they were practicing nonviolent protest (Asimov and Berton). But consider as well that for women and transgendered people in many places in the world who wish to walk the street at night in safety, the moment of appearing on the street involves a deliberate risk of exposure to force. Groups who gather without permits and without weapons to oppose privatization and rally for democracy, as we saw in Gezi Park in Istanbul in June 2013, are actively taking that risk. Such groups may have no legal and police protection, but they are not for that reason reduced to some sort of bare life. There is no sovereign power jettisoning the subject outside the domain of the political as such; rather, there is a renewal of popular sovereignty outside and against the terms of state sovereignty and police power, one that involves a concerted and corporeal form of exposure and resistance.

An image widely circulated on the Internet has been called “Woman in Red Dress,” and it became a rallying point for the resistance to police brutality in Gezi Park in June 2013. In this picture, Ceyda Sungur, a research assistant at Istanbul Technical University, is being pepper-sprayed by police in full riot gear. The image is a difficult one, to be sure. It is an act of brute force leveled against a woman in a red, cotton dress holding a canvas bag. She looks precisely like someone trying to enjoy a summer day in the park, but she has arrived to be part of the rally. She does not walk deliberately into harm’s way, but when the pepper spray comes at her, she stands firm, looking away to protect her eyes. The image is effective: a woman, unarmed and manifestly vulnerable, offsets the brutality of the police. I am reminded that there are at least two films called The Woman in Red. In the 1984 Gene Wilder version, the woman in red is passing over a grate on the street as the wind funnels upward to lift her skirts and mess her hair, leaving her looking sexually ravaged—a clear reference to the image of Marilyn Monroe in a white dress in the 1955 film The Seven Year Itch. The Gezi Park image, however, is not a site of obsessive focus: the pepper spray that messes up the woman’s hair and blows her dress indicts the police use of sexual attack and gender violence. It is important to remember that among those who gathered in Gezi Park to protect the public status of those grounds against state-led efforts at privatization were not only lesbian, gay, and transgender people, who had quite rarely been able to gather in a public space with the solidarity of a broader movement, but also women insisting on their right to walk the streets at night without harassment and the threat of sexual assault.

In the image, the woman remains uncannily firm as the spray is unleashed against her. She does not run, flee, or fall but remains in place. Remaining in place has marked a number of the actions in Gezi as groups refused to move or formed human barricades—the example of the standing man, for instance (“‘Standing Man’”). Although the iconic dimension of the photo seems to rely on the subordinate and sexualized status of the woman in red, I want to suggest that we are seeing a form of deliberate exposure that mobilizes vulnerability in a practice of resistance that belongs to a direct democracy movement. By “deliberate,” I do not mean that the woman is staging this scene. She is in fact suffering an unwanted assault; but in suffering it, she stands firm and thereby exposes the force unleashed against her. Note that her exposure is not only to the pepper spray but also to the camera recording the event, which operates as an iconic corporeal vector through which that local violence is relayed into a global visual field. She does not initiate what happens but, like so many others, improvises when it happens. Does the improvising diminish the violence by showing that there is nevertheless a form of agency at work here? I think not. Like many nonviolent actions, the power or capacity to take the blow without returning it in kind serves not only as an embodied critique of violence but also as an exercise of the right to stand one’s ground in concert with others, to claim or reclaim public space as public, and to mobilize vulnerability—for example, by redeploying the iconic charge of the image for global media. The agency here belongs to the camera, the crowd, and the bodies in place. It is effective precisely because the situation is unwanted and unwilled. The woman figured has not brought the assault on herself, but she does enter into a scene of ongoing assault to resist it. At one level, it indeed seems that brutality was unleased upon her as she walked in the park with her canvas bag and red dress. It is equally true that she was already part of the movement, having joined the assembly and exercised those everyday freedoms that belong to a public park: strolling, baring one’s arms to the warm sun, even wearing red, the color of the Turkish national flag. Wearing red, she seizes the iconicity of the national—and perhaps lets it resonate with Hollywood and with the political reach of the camera more generally—to oppose the state. The camera is part of the movement, providing testimony and archive, entering the image into the circuit of media distribution that establishes the local events as global and exposes the injustice.

Vulnerability, then, can emerge in resistance movements and direct democracy as a deliberate mobilization of bodily exposure. “Mobilization of bodily exposure” is an embarrassing phrase, but it challenges the notions that vulnerability is identified with victimization alone and that the deliberate use of vulnerability constitutes a form of agency that overcomes injurability.

I suggested above that we are dealing with two senses of resistance here: resistance to vulnerability that belongs to certain projects of thought and certain formations of politics organized by sovereign mastery; resistance to unjust and violent regimes that mobilizes vulnerability as part of its own exercise of power. I have now tried to suggest that the body is exposed both to police force and to photographic capture, and on some occasions (not all) photographic journalism still has the power to exploit and reverse visual icons of sexualized violence. The scene of vulnerability is not a subjective feature of the human, nor is it an existential condition. It names a set of relations between sensate beings and the field of objects, organizations, life processes, and institutions that make livable life possible. These relations invariably involve degrees and modalities of receptivity and responsiveness that, working together, do not precisely form a sequence. In political life, it often seems that some injustice happens and that then there is a response, but it may be that the response is happening as the injustice occurs. This simultaneity gives us another way to think about historical events, action, passion, and forms of resistance. Without being able to think about vulnerability, we cannot think about resistance, and by thinking about resistance, we are already under way, dismantling the resistance to vulnerability in order precisely to resist.

Note

1. For this double sense of resistance, see Rose. ↩

Works Cited

Asimov, Nanette, and Justin Berton. “UC Campus Police Move in on Student Protesters.” SFGate. Hearst Communications, 9 Nov. 2011. Web. 24 Feb. 2014.

Rose, Jacqueline. The Last Resistance. London: Verso, 2007. Print.

“‘Standing Man’ Goes Viral, Inspires Silent Protests in Turkey.” NBC News. NBCNews.com, 18 June 2013. Web. 24 Feb. 2014. Photoblog.

White, Hayden. “Writing in the Middle Voice.” The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1957–2007. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2010. 255–62. Print.

The Woman in Red. Dir. Gene Wilder. Orion Pictures, 1984. Film.

Judith Butler is Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Visiting Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University and Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. A version of this paper was presented at the 2014 MLA convention in Chicago.

Posted March 2014