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Interview with Judith Butler

 

WHEN THE ECONOMY BECOMES THE RALLYING CRY FOR THE NEW EUGENICS - VISIONS ABOUT THE QUARANTINE WITH JUDITH BUTLER

Article published in The Diplomatique Brazil, May 2020

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In interview, North-American philosopher Judith Butler claims that we live times when solidarity has become essential, the ideal moment to create networks of support, saying that affection is one of the challenges of this XXI century

By Juan Dominguez e Rafael Zen

 

In “Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street” of 2015, North-American philosopher Judith Butler advised that discussions about the expression "we, the people" should understand the cultural and ideological complexity of the social fabric that builds a nation.

There, she was focused on understanding populational precarity - a phenomenon when intersectional bodies (between gender, race and class) feel more disposable facing political practices and disputing social narratives. Butler debated that this feeling of precarity was not equally distributed inside our societies - concluding that some bodies are clearly more valuable than others inside the neoliberal economic market.

Thinking about public assemblies, the book stood up for bodies on the streets, understanding them as a democratic scream where "we, the people" gained form to conquer political claims by practices of no-violence as performative strategies.

In 2020, Butler released her last theoretical production, “The Force of Nonviolence”, where she thinks of a new method to social living, radical equality, when no life should be more valuable than others.

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Your most recent book, The Force of Non-Violence (2020), dialogues with the concept of the interdependency of life as the basis of social and political equality. It even evokes cultural phantasms that explain a hierarchy of violent practices versus the precariousness of different lives. It seems to be something you were already feeling in “Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street” (2015), where assemblies assured the importance of physical beings gathering together to put political speeches in action. Is this time, where a lot of people are being quarantined home, the moment to rethink non-violent actions on digital platforms?

JB:  One could, yes, always examine the practices of doxxing and trolling, especially as they affect women and minorities, but I wonder whether right now it is more important to consider how social policies are framed and applied in ways that mean death for many poor people, especially the indigenous, the incarcerated, and those who, as a result of racist policies, have never had the health care they deserved.  After all, the death rates among black people in the US are directly correlated to black poverty and dis-enfranchisement.  

 

When we talk about those with "pre-existing medical conditions" we are often talking about those who never received the diagnoses and health care that they surely deserved.  This is one of the death-dealing effects of market capitalism, and we should be using this time to think about universal health care and its relation to socialism under global conditions that illuminate our interdependence.

Thinking about assemblies and precarious lives, these times show that some bodies are entitled to home-office and quarantine, while others simply continue going to work, underpaid, so everyone else can get freshly brewed coffees and bagels. Some bodies are aged and poor, so they get last in line to save the young and privileged. Others were discontinued from their jobs because the Economy cannot crash – anything but the Economy.

Let’s go back to a question that seems very important to your work: when we reach these times of peak, which humans count as human?

JB:  We have to be very clear that all humans have equal value.  And yet most of our ideas about what the human is implies radical inequality.  Some people turn out to be more "human" and more "valuable" in the eyes of the market and the state.  

 

We do not yet know what the human would be if we were to imagine all humans as equally valuable.  It would be a new image or idea, a new horizon. When we hear about the "health" of the economy as more important than the "health" of the workers, the elderly, and the poor, we are asked to devalue human health in order to give priority to economic health.  

 

But if "economic health" implies exposing the worker to disease and death, then we are really talking only about productivity and profits, not "the economy".The brutality of capitalism is now demonstrated without any cover, without any qualification: the worker must go to work in order to live, but the workplace is the site where the worker risks death.  

 

Marx said it in the mid 19th century, but it applies to our present moment in a frightening way.

In February, you told the New Yorker that “most people who are formed within the
liberal individualist tradition really understand themselves as bounded creatures who are radically separate from other lives”. Here we are, two months later, completely clueless of this new world people seem to be preaching about. We cannot deny there is a fuss about class equality, the crash of neoliberalism or even a new consciousness for the masses – it’s all over social media, the news, daily messages. In your opinion, will this shock be enough to overcome the barriers of our individualism? Is this shock a real awakening or is it just a symptom of a collective numbness?

JB:  Perhaps we cannot decide whether we will be shocked into understanding global interdependency as a fact, an enduring feature of our existence, or will we be pushed back into national boundaries and identities, market logis, and individualism.  

 

What seems clear is these are some of the terms of the contemporary struggle.  It matter whether we understand ourselves as porous creatures, those who are in a constant exchange with our environments and others as a way of living, in order to live.  And yet, fantasies of individual self-sufficiency are deep structures of masculinity, and fantasies of national self-sufficiency are weak but compelling forms of ideology during times like this.

 

It would make a difference to understand that we are interpellated by the virus as a global community, not one that is the mere effect of globalization. We have a chance to create new forms of social solidarity builty on the insight that each one of our lives is part of a web or network of interdependent relations.  

 

Both the individual and the nation have to be rethought within such a frame.


This moment also seems to be the time to discuss an broader concept of intersectionality. What does it tell us about the gaps between class, race and gender?


JB:  Intersectionality allows us to see who is disproportionately affected by the virus, those who are disproportionately unprotected and exposed, those who are most likely to die tend to be poor, indigenous, people of color, those whose work is dispensable and have never had the privilege of decent health care.  

 

Women who have been kept out of certain jobs, who undertake household labor without compensation, who suffer abuse within the home - all of these communities are in danger.  What intersectionality allows us to see is that the threat of death or abandonment to disease increases for those who belong to many of these categories, those who might not be able to choose which of these categories applied best to them because so many apply with equal intensity.


Today, the way in which people can get together in groups is indoors and through the use of telecommunications. How do individual and collective articulations of organization change for the dispute of narratives and political identities? And what role do those who do not have a connection to the network play?

JB:  People are more interested than ever in what is being written and posted, so we are bound to one another as writers as readers, and art work that was very often reserved for performance spaces is suddenly on view for whatever public can access it.  

 

Perhaps this is a time for reflection  Every social movement needs time to think about where it has been, and where it should go.  It is also a time of care, the care of individual for one another, but the elaboration of networks of care on the net that involve people helping to find health care, food, shelter, and legal representation.  None of these needs have been satisfied, and all of them are exacerbated under contemporary conditions.  I see that people still meet online in large numbers, and that there are ways of building networks of mutual aid, rent strikes, and tuition strikes online that are effective.  

 

Assemblies have always depended on the networks that do not arrive on the street.  Or, rather, those networks arrive every time a person appears in embodied form.  We cannot now easily disarticulate the body and network.


In this moment, the neofascism that elected Trump and Bolsonaro protests the end of the isolation, even knowing the experience of the United States, which shows the lethality of the pandemic. How can we not think that there is a will to exterminate the marginal bodies through this trigger?

JB:  To the extent that both Trump and Bolsonaro favor opening the economy knowing full well that it will escalate the number of lives lost, we can rightly conclude that they are imagining that it is "the vulnerable communities' who are most likely to perish, and that that is ok.  They are not imagining that their most youthful and productive workers will perish.  

 

But many of them can be very seriously debilitated and imperiled by the disease and when they return home or see their relatives, they are more likely to become sources of infection.  It may be that they are not thinking it through, or that they have thought it through and are willing to let people die.  Bolsonaro seems to believe in a form of social darwinism according to which only the strong will survive, and only the strong should survive.  He even imagines himself as unconquerable by the disease - the ultimate form of narcissistic fantasy.

 

Trump's narcissism may differ a bit, since he is only and always tallying votes in his mind.  He will not win his reelection of the economy is not strong.  "It's the economy, stupid!" now becomes the rallying cry for the new eugenics.


How the position of the extreme right to ask for a return to work, to deny state participation, is linked to the reaffirmation of an identity and an idea of masculinity and femininity. Is it possible to think that neoliberalism only conceives of a neoliberal masculinity and femininity?

JB:  I am not a very good theorist of neoliberalism, and I am mindful of how complex those debates have been.  I would say only that we are living in an economic condition which increasing numbers of people are living at the edge of life, exposed to death, mired in precarity.  And that there are very few constraints on the corporate billionaires as they accumulate profits that exceed the wealth of most countries in the world.  

 

We have let this deadly economic inequality take form and now we are seeing in graphic and horrible ways just how easily the lives of the most vulnerable can be abandoned and destroyed. My wager is that deep-seated versons of masculinity and femininity are re-enacted in new forms within neoliberalism, but that neoliberalism does not produce radically new gender formations.

 

In asking people to return to the household, governments are assuming that households have their own structure of care, that the gendered division of labor is in place, that women, even when fully employed and working from home, will also assume the daily tasks of house-care and childcare.   Some households are not families, and some people live alone or in shelters with others they do not know.  And women are more deeply imperiled by domestic violence when they are restrained from gaining help outside the home.  

 

So we should be mindful that gender is being re-ordered with this form of confinement, and do all that we can to keep alive those networks of friendship, community, queer allinace and solidarity online until we can, once again, demonstrate our numbers on the street.

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Illustration by Luciana Seibert

SUPRESSING THE OTHER IN THE QUEERMUSEUM EPISODE: FREEDOM OF SPEECH UNDER COERCION AND WHAT CAN QUEER ARTIVISM DO

Article published in Palindrome Magazine, July 2018

Graduate Studies in Visual Arts

Issue 21 - Narratives from the Self, and from the Other

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From the closing of the Queermuseum exhibition in 2017, neofundamentalist manipulative strategies can be acknowledged when their tactics desubjectivate the individual expression of queer artists.

 

This work aims to debate the “other's” suppression in the dictatorship of the “self” from the impossibility of freedom when in times of coercion. As secondary goals, it is admitted: theoretically discuss freedom of speech; reveal inside language a place of fire through artistic speech; and analyze the work of the artist Bia Leite, exhibited in the show.


Methodologically, a bibliographic research was conducted so it was possible to correlate the study with Leite’s work. By its conclusion, when approaching differences cartography,
this research faces artivism as a speech tool used by sociopolitical movements, reinsuring resistance’s importance.

Key words: Artivism. Queer theory. Freedom of speech. Queermuseum. Contemporary art.

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Through Bia Leite's "Faggot Child", showcased at Queermuseum, it is possible to observe a conservative political system of antagonisms where verisimilitude / likelihood (the compulsory idea of turning everyone there is into an imitation of a stale identity - usually normalized by societal structures) creates symbolic spaces where ambiguity is not admitted. To conservative militancies, a self that is "different" - and unpredictable because it acts outside conventional (patriarchal-colonial-capitalis) norms -  is something to be annihilated because it is presupposed that between those bodies any parameter of approximation (similarity) has been lost.

BILLBOARD ART AS TEMPORARY AUTONOMOUS ZONE: EXHIBITIVE PLATFORMS AND PIRATE SPEECH THROUGH URBAN ART

Co-Author: Celia Antonacci Ramos

Article published in Palindrome Magazine, April 2018

Graduate Studies in Visual Arts

Issue 20 - Art PlatFORMS

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Advertising stands for a group of practices that ally discursive techniques with symbolic constructions to brand development and uses media to sell its objects. From the work of art analysis of Félix Gonzalez-Torres, Barbara Kruger, and Gran Fury collective, it is asked: can contemporary art enable counterattacks against normative speeches, proposing the occupation of billboards as an exhibitive platform for pirate (anti-establishment) concepts?

From this initial question, this arcticle’s main goal is to correlate the billboard media as a tool of capitalist rhetoric and its occupation as an exhibitive platform for pirate speeches.

 

Understanding urban art as a polemizer of speeches on urban iconography, it is concluded that billboard art can create spaces-between acting polemically + ephemerally, making disobedient poetics possible in the city’s urbanized spaces, a
voice attempt within an excess of urban voices.


Key words: Temporary autonomous zone. Billboard art. Poetic terrorism. Urban art. Consumerism languages.

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From multiple analysis of urban artworks, such as Gran Fury's "Wall Street Money", it is noticeable the making of confrontational temporary zones that restore public spaces to share anti-establishment dialogues mediated by mass media devices. The fundamental role of these zones (in this case, anti-colonial billboard art) is to suggest counter-thoughts for the notion of what advertising spaces should communicate, and promote. The artist, then, becomes an undercover agent working for the "other side" of the economic/political frontier, inserting itself in these between-spaces built by advertising, slogans living in an impossible future with its perpetuous avoidance of the present. In these cases, the artist is also an advertiser - but against the capitalist flow of shallow speeches. The artist becomes a poetic terrorist, ephemeral. An artivist of temporary geographies.

TEMPORARY AUTONOMOUS ZONES,

AND NOMAD THOUGHTS

First published on April 3rd, 2018

Temporary Autonomous Zone column, O Municipio Newspaper, Brazil

 

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“The nomad is not the same as the migrant; for the migrant goes principally from one point to another, even if the second point is uncertain, unforeseen, or not well localized. But the nomad goes from point to point only as a consequence and as a factual necessity; in principle, points for him are relayed along a trajectory.

 

Even though the nomadic trajectory may follow trails or customary routes, it does not fulfill the function of the sedentary road, which is to parcel out a closed space to people, assigning each person a share and regulating the communication between shares. The nomadic trajectory does the opposite: it distributes people in an open space, one that is indefinite and noncommunicating.

 

If the nomad can be called The Deterritorialized, it is precisely because there is no reterritorialization afterwards the sedentary (the sedentary's relation with the earth is mediatized by something else, a property regime, a State apparatus).

 

With the nomad, on the contrary, it is deterritorialization that constitutes the relation to the earth, to such a degree that the nomad reterritorializes on deterritorialization itself.”

 

Excerpts from A Thousand Plateaus, by Gilles Deleuze + Felix Guattari (1987) / Pages 402 - 403

 

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If you are afraid of ideas, and concepts - don’t be. Theoretical knowledge is as important to shaping reality as non-scientific thinking, mostly because through theories, debates, and lived experience we are able to restructure the world, and propose new possible ways of coexisting within social structures.

 

This means that concepts and ideas make the world move - whether one likes it or not. It also implies that it is impossible to keep critical thinking updated without altering beliefs, and destroying old preconceptions - whether one likes it or not.

 

About temporary autonomous zones, anarchic thinker Hakim Bey said in 1985: it is possible to see clearly that our society was formed over a predominant social model, a mass cycle that incubates the State, one State after the other.

 

Analyzing the existence of discursive constructions that travel linguistically, and culturally amongst us - ways to speak, hierarchies of listening, methods of obeying, models of thinking, boundaries for opposing, techniques to normalize a living subject -, Bey defends that there will always be people (artists, philosophers, sociologists, activists, teachers, citizens) willing to defend a anti-normalization speech through all media available, occupying traditional spaces with utterances in counterflux. We could call all of these ephemeral attempts of building resistance spaces as temporary autonomous zones.

 

What do we, as researchers, expect from nomad texts? We expect them to conquer new imaginary spaces through decolonial realms of ideas, to create a method of debating crucial terms of social contemporary reality keeping knowledge away from authoritarianism and coercion, to suggest new ways to manifest dialogue. To reach other broods.

 

By brood, Bey understands a group of travellers (readers? thinkers?) guided by the desire or curiosity to know other sides, words, routes. Compelled to establish affective bonds, we - the generation to be fed/entertained by mass media, and mass knowledge - try to engage in thinking that defies the stimuli of contemporary industrial culture.

 

We want to reach out to readers that are not merely satisfied by the nonsense that was fed to us - the ones who keep living/supporting this colonial scheme.

 

To the readers we want to reach, there is an urgent need to face long-established systemic issues, and understanding how multiple and complex the social world is - as complex as there are ways to live all this life’s possibilities.

 

We reject static thinking - a thought stable and content with concepts of truth cemented by centuries of oppressive domination. We reject any thought that gets too used to standing still, and hurting.

 

We seek - as Gilles Deleuze would agree - for nomad thinking, a method of dialogue that creates new concepts beyond absolute certainties, to establish the necessary conditions to narrate enunciations that runs to the opposite direction of stillness, a conception of discourse that allows new conditions of dialogue to emerge.

 

Nomad thought is also a phenomenon of resistance to present times - an experience of underrepresented voices to report illusions that have contaminated normative thinking. Facing the myth of homogeneity, nomad thinking offers its logical retranslation: one capable of creating social fictions to dictate ways of behaving is also the one capable of getting rid of the same stereotypes one has developed. Here, nomad thinking is a collective exercise.

 

An autonomous zone suggests a method of thinking that is always at the risk limit, where thinking is an experimental process, the reinvention of reality through language so freedom and democracy may become practical conditions for social life. In autonomous nomad spaces, thought is no longer concerned about majorities, the average citizen, the cogs of our oppressive colonial-capitalist social mechanism.

 

On the contrary, a nomad thought states the possibility of singular multiple voices, because the social public space demands an understanding of difference.

 

To reconfigure the malaise of authoritarian forces that shape and dictate our bodies, we - the nomad autonomous - incline to turn thinking into a linguistic adventure of resisting this horrendous present. Let us think the world through, then.

MIRRORS, ACTIVISTS, TEACHERS, TRUTH-TELLERS:

TRACES OF WHO THE POET IS

First published on March 23rd, 2021

The Source - Forum of Diversity, Vancouver / Canada

 

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the doctor says, brain tumor
and my mother does not answer
I watch my ghost leave her body
from where I am eye-to-eye,
confined to sterile bed & papery sheets
aging is tenuous in my small body
a carriage of all her favourite memories

Excerpt from “age nine”
(Nisha Patel in Coconut, Newest Press)

“Some of us are storytellers, truth-tellers, occupying a space in opposition to injustice,” says Nisha Patel, a queer poet from Treaty 6 territory, currently the City of Edmonton’s Poet Laureate and the Canadian Individual Slam Champion.

“We function as mirrors. Others are activists, organizers, curators of art and experience. We are teachers and speakers, in the business of instructing others through the world.”

The poet goes further.

“Poetry is a path into a person’s world, illuminating their perspective and their emotional connection to their surroundings,” she says.

Poetry as an exploration of human existence


April is Canada’s National Poetry Month. Its goal is to bring together schools, publishers, booksellers, literary organizations, libraries, and poets from across the country to celebrate poetry and its vital place in Canada’s culture. The League of Canadian Poets (poets.ca), established the National Poetry Month in April 1998.

Readers of poetry, Patel says, are seeking out a reflection and exploration of humanity, both their own and the writer’s. When someone reads, they do so to connect, to empathize, and to feel emboldened in their own story as a result.

She points out authors such as Titilope Sonuga, Jillian Christmas, Bahar Orang, Ian Keteku, and Mercedes Eng who show that the role of the poet is multiple – but necessary.

Ideas on the poetic power of community


“The challenge, always, is to write poetry that matters to yourself. Do my words make sense? Why should someone read what I have to say? And the answer is always: if you tell your truth, you will find those who need to hear your story,” says Patel.

The poet remembers spending most of her time taking in and reacting to the world around – then poetry allowed her to distill and crystalize those complex emotions, celebrate or grieve, and then share with the world, deepening her connection to multiple communities of sensitive eyes.

To writers thinking of experimenting with poetry, Patel stresses the necessity of building a community of readers, as it allows the artist to share those impressions on the world and everything that emerges from the act of writing.

“If you want to be a poet, you need to write poems in community. You do not need to publish or create a 20k follower Instagram page. You need to write, and you need to have community, and if you do one without the other you will suffer, because you alone cannot see past all the gaps in your own understanding of the world,” she says.

She has found that poetry – unlike other genres – best captures the nuance of the human mind in relation to the world, and how it forms connections: often in imagery, comparison, and likeness, rather than in absolute terms or descriptive text alone. To write poetry, then, is the equivalent of being free – a possibility that is open to anyone with the urge to tell their story.

Poetry is freedom


Poet Kayla Czaga also acknowledges how poetry can make the author achieve some kind of freedom. “I’m no poetry-evangelist,” she says. “While poetry speaks to me personally, and it would be nice if more people read it, I’m not interested in convincing them to do so.”

Czaga is the author of two collections of poetry, was awarded by the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and is currently serving an online poetry program for SFU’s The Writer’s Studio. She believes poetry is an exercise of attention to the world and the writer’s surroundings.

She remembers how Oscar Wilde once said that poetry could be the only truly free literary genre because it doesn’t make any money. To Wilde, the poets can do whatever they want without having to think about market forces and other outside influences. That reads as freedom to Czaga.

“Although I’m allergic to generalizations, for me poetry is about an attention to language and the world”, she says. Czaga also points out to the fact that Canada has a rich literary culture with many exciting poets taking language to new inventive experimentations.

“To signal-boost a few debut authors: Molly Cross-Blanchard, Selina Boan, Tara Borin, Shaun Robinson, and Bardia Sinaee. All of these poets have their first books out now or soon from Coach House, Nightwood Editions, Brick Books, and House of Anansi. I’m incredibly thankful to live in a country with such a wealth of excellent presses”, says Czaga.

Talking directly to those thinking of becoming poets, she suggests: “read a lot; focus on the process of putting words in combinations that excite you onto paper; and fall in love with that process”.

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