Precariousness and Grievability

Shereen delves into Judith Butler’s concept of grievability and the ways in which grief is intrinsically linked to the value of human life, especially in times of war.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
All Zone Media. Hello, Welcome to it could happen here today.
My episode is going to be a bit more philosophical.
I love me some philosophy. I don't always understand it,
but I do like it. And I read something recently

(00:24):
that really stuck with me, especially in the context of
what is currently going on right now in Palestine and
the genocide and Gaza. I read something and I couldn't
stop thinking about it, so I thought, let's just make
an episode. So today I wanted to talk about this
word I learned called grievability. It was coined by Judith

(00:45):
Butler in this blog post from twenty fifteen, when Butler
is asking the question when is life grievable? In twenty sixteen,
Butler wrote a book called Frames of War. When is
Life Grievable? And this is a quote from this book.
One way of posing the question of who we are
in these times of war is by asking whose lives

(01:06):
are considered valuable, whose lives are mourned, and whose lives
are considered ungrievable. We might think of war as dividing
populations into those who are grievable in those who are not.
An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because
it has never lived, that is, it has never counted
as a life at all. We can see the division

(01:29):
of the globe into grievable and ungrievable lives from the
perspective of those who wage war in order to defend
the lives of certain communities and to defend them against
the lives of others, even if it means taking those
latter lives. So that quote kind of encompasses the idea
of grievability. I really just thought it was poignant to

(01:51):
talk about and relevant because we are being inundated with
all these numbers every day of casualties and death count
and collateral damage. And people accept these things because it's
part of being human. It's just the way war is.
But I really don't think we should accept that as
the reality. I think that makes us callous. And I

(02:13):
think accepting human death, no matter in what context, is
a little bit inhuman And so I think maybe that's
why this concept fascinated me, because tying grief to the
concept of being alive, it truly is indicative of if
that life is worth something to you or to the world.
And so we're reading and hearing about all these lives lost,

(02:36):
and we're giving these numbers and stories, and these numbers
are repeated every day, and they increase every day, and
this repetition seems endless and impossible to change. And Butler
is saying that we don't often consider the precarious character
of the lives lost in war. And Butler defines precariousness
as the following. To say that a life is precarious

(02:58):
requires not only that a life be apprehended as a life,
but also that precariousness be an aspect of what is
apprehended in what is the living normatively construed. I am
arguing that there ought to be a more inclusive and
egalitarian way of recognizing precariousness, and that this should take
form as concrete social policy regarding such issues as shelter work, food,

(03:23):
medical care, and legal status. Butler goes on to explain
that although this initially seems paradoxical, precariousness itself actually cannot
be properly recognized. Butler says, it can be apprehended, taken in, encountered,
and it can be presupposed by certain norms of recognition,
just as it can be refused by such norms. But

(03:46):
the main recognition of precariousness should be as this shared
condition of human life, so precariousness being a condition that
links human life and humans to non human animals. So
for nat to say that a life is injurable, that
it can be lost, hurt, destroyed, or systematically neglected to

(04:07):
the point of death is to underscore not only the
finitude of a life and that death is certain, but
also the precariousness of life, that life requires various social
and economic conditions to be met in order to be
sustained as a life. Precariousness implies that living socially means
that one's life is always, in some sense in the

(04:28):
hands of the other. It implies exposure both to those
we know and to those we do not know, a
dependency on people we know or barely know, or know
not at all. This existential reality that everything ends and
everything is temporary. This encapsulates our relation to death and
to life. Precariousness underscores what Butler calls our quote radical

(04:53):
substitution ability and anonymity, and that dying and death is
just as socially facilitated a humans persisting and flourishing. So
Butler is saying it's not that we are born and
then later become precarious, but rather that precariousness is intrinsic
with birth itself, and birth is by definition precarious. It

(05:14):
means that it matters whether a newly born infant survives,
and its survival is dependent on what we might call
a social network of hands. Precisely because a living being
may die, it is necessary to care for that being
so it may live. I put the following sentence in
bold because I think it's kind of underlying what I'm

(05:36):
trying to say, even though it sounds really simple. But
only under conditions in which the loss would matter does
the value of the life appear. And again, maybe it
sounds simple, but I don't think we actually absorb the
meaning of what that means to value a life and
to mourn a life. And this is how we come

(05:56):
to the idea of grievability, the idea that grievability is
a pre supposition for the life that matters. Butler gives
us this example, so let's think about this. An infant
comes into the world, is sustained in and sustained by
that world as an infant, and through to adulthood and
old age, and finally, eventually it dies. We imagine that

(06:18):
when the child is wanted, there is celebration at the
beginning of life. But there can be no celebration without
an implicit understanding that the life is grievable, that it
would be grieved if it were lost, that this future
possibility is installed as the condition of its life. Life
is celebrated because it can be lost an ordinary language,

(06:40):
Butler says, grief attends the life that has already been
lived and presupposes that life as having ended. So the
value of life comes from the reality and certainty that
it will end. And if we think about this idea
of possibility of future, this lack of possibility that has
happens when death happens. Grievability is a condition of a

(07:03):
life's emergence and sustenance this future concept that a life
has been lived is presupposed at the beginning of a
life that has only begun to be lived. In other words,
Butler says, this will be a life that will have
been lived. Is the presupposition of a grievable life, which
means that this will be a life that can be

(07:25):
regarded as life and sustained by that regard. I know
it sounds heady, and I really had to read this
multiple times to even try to comprehend it. But essentially,
without grievability, without the impulse to mourn a life, there
is no life, or rather, there is something living that
is other than life. This other than life thing is

(07:47):
a life that will never have been lived in the
first place, because it's not mourned, and it's sustained by
no regard, no testimony, and it is ungrieved when it
is lost. The unease and anxiety and at apprehension of
grievability precedes and makes possible the unease and anxiety and
apprehension of precarious life, and so grievability precedes and makes

(08:12):
possible the apprehension of the living being as living exposed
to non life. From the start, to put it in
maybe a simpler way for me to understand even is
that a life is worth grieving because we already know
it will die, and that life is worth celebrating because

(08:33):
it has already been exposed to death or the implication
of certain death. From the start. It is pretty heady,
but maybe I'll just leave you to marinate with that
during a break and we can get more heady when
we get back. Okay, we're back. Let's go back to

(09:03):
the idea of war. One way of posing the question
of who we are in these times of war is
by asking whose lives are considered valuable, whose lives are mourned,
and whose lives are considered unagrievable. War is essentially the
division of populations into those who are a grievable and
those who are not. An ungrievable life is one that

(09:26):
cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is,
it has never counted as life at all. And we
see this division of the entire world into grievable and
ungrievable lives when we look at the perspective of those
who wage war in order to defend their certain communities.
This is kind of reiterating the quote that I'd started

(09:46):
with at the top from twenty sixteen, but essentially to
defend these certain communities against the life of others, it
usually implies the taking of those other lives. Butler here
makes a reference to nine to eleven, explating that after
the attacks of nine to eleven, the media showed us
graphic pictures of those who died along with their names,
their stories, and the reactions of their families. Public grieving

(10:11):
was dedicated to making these images iconic for the nation,
which meant that, of course, there was considerably less public
grieving for let's say, non US nationals, and none at
all for illegal workers. Butler says the differential distribution of
public grieving is a political issue of enormous significance, And

(10:32):
Butler asks, why is it that governments so often seek
to regulate and control who will be publicly grievable and
who will not? Because it means something to state and
to show the name of someone who has died, to
put together some remnants of a life, and to publicly
display and draw attention to the loss. So Butler's asking,

(10:54):
in this context, what would happen if those killed in
war were to be grieved in such an oath? Why
is it that we are not given the names of
all the war dead, including those the US has killed,
of whom we will never have the image, the name,
the story, never have a testimonial shard of their life,

(11:15):
nothing to see, to touch, to know. Open grieving is
bound up with outrage. Outrage in the face of injustice
or of unbearable loss, has enormous political potential. Butler draws
a similarity here to Plato. Apparently, one of the reasons
Plato wanted to ban the poets from the Republic is

(11:36):
that he thought that if citizens went too often to
watch tragedy, they would weep over the losses they saw,
and that such open and public mourning, in disrupting the
order and hierarchy of the soul, would disrupt the order
and hierarchy of political authority as well. And I didn't
know this, but to put it in that context is

(11:56):
really fascinating to me, because it's essentially saying that if
we expose human beings to the reality of tragedy in life,
they might care too much and start to fuck up
our politics. Essentially, so, whether we are speaking about open
grief or outrage, we are talking about effective or emotional

(12:16):
responses that are highly regulated by regimes of power and
sometimes subject to explicit censorship. The blog post I'm referring
to that Judith Butler wrote was written in twenty fifteen.
So Butler uses the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as
examples of what they're trying to say. For the wars
in Iraq, in Afghanistan. We saw how emotion was regulated

(12:38):
to support both the war effort and more specifically, nationalists belonging.
When the photos of Abu grab were first released in
the US, conservative television pundits argued that it would be
un American to show them because we were not supposed
to have graphic evidence of the acts of torture the
US has committed. We were not supposed to know that

(12:58):
the US had violated in nationally recognized human rights. It
was Unamerican to show these photos, an Unamerican to glean
information from them as to how the war was being conducted.
Bill O'Reilly thought that the photos would create a negative
image of the US and that we had an obligation
to defend a positive image of the country. Donald Rumsfeld

(13:20):
said something similar, suggesting it was anti American to display
the photos. Of course, these idiots didn't consider, and neither
did the vast majority of people in power. But the
American public should have a right to know about the
activities of its military, and it should have the right
to judge a war. Understanding and judging a war on

(13:43):
the basis of full evidence is or at least it
should be part of the democratic tradition of participation and deliberation.
So what was this really saying Butler's asking they say,
it seems to me that those who sought to limit
the power of them image in this instance also sought
to limit the power of effect of outrage, knowing full

(14:06):
well that it could and would turn public opinion against
the war in Iraq as it died it did. I
feel like this is especially fascinating and parallel to what
we're seeing now with the people in Palestine broadcasting horrific
images of what is happening to them because of the
state of Israel, and how there is selective outrage because

(14:29):
it is almost impolite to show or proliferate these images
that only show reality. It really feels like people are
only outraged when they consider a life grievable, which takes
us to this whole topic. It brings us back to
the question of whose lives are regarded as mournable, as grievable,

(14:49):
and whose lives are regarded as worthy of protection, whose
lives are regarded as belonging to subjects with rights that
should be honored. This ties in direct to the idea
of how effect or emotion is regulated and what we
mean by the regulation of emotion at all. Butler references
the anthropologist Talal Assad, who wrote a book about suicide bombing.

(15:12):
In this book, the first question he poses is why
do we feel horror and moral repulsion in the face
of suicide bombing when we do not always feel the
same way in the face of state sponsored violence. He
asks this question not in order to say that these
forms of violence are the same or equatable, or even
to say that we ought to feel the same moral

(15:33):
outrage in relation to both. But Asad finds it curious,
as does Butler, that our moral responses, responses that first
take form as effect, are tacitly regulated by certain kinds
of interpretive frameworks. His thesis is that we feel more
horror and moral revulsion in the face of lives lost

(15:53):
under certain conditions than under certain others. Asad explains that,
for instance, if someone kills or is killed in war,
and the war is state sponsored, and we invest the
state with legitimacy, then we consider the death lamentable, sad, unfortunate,
but ultimately not radically unjust. And yet if the violence

(16:16):
is perpetrated by insurgency groups regarded as illegitimate, that our
emotion invariably changes, or so ASAD assumes. Asad is saying
something here that is really important about how the politics
of moral responsiveness really feed into public perception. That what
we feel is in part conditioned by how we interpret

(16:38):
the world around us, that how we interpret what we
feel actually can and does alter the feeling itself. If
we can accept our emotion could be affected and structured
by things we do not fully understand, can this help
us understand why it is that we might feel horror
in the face of certain losses, but in difference or

(16:59):
even righteousness in the light of others. Conditions of war
bring something really interesting here, this feeling of heightened nationalism.
In this feeling of heightened nationalism, it's as though our
existence is bound with others with whom we find some
kind of national affinity for who are recognizable to us

(17:20):
and who can conform to certain culturally specific notions about
what the culturally recognizable human is. And sure, maybe some
of you are like, well, this is really obvious. Of course,
some people care more about people who look like them
or about things that directly affect them. But what I'm
arguing is that I can't accept that as reality. I

(17:40):
don't think we should accept humans as by default callous.
There's no way change happens that way. I think we
have to question why we unconsciously are more outraged by
certain losses than others, or why the public is this
way even if you are not. Oh, that's a lot
of stuff, it's a lot of information. Let's take our
second break. We can just marinate with all of that,

(18:03):
and uh, we'll be right back to wrap us up. Okay,
we're back. So we discussed the differentiation of the population
of the world into grievable and unagrievable lives, and now

(18:26):
we are going to differentiate between the populations on whom
your life and existence depend on, and those populations represent
a direct threat to your life in existence. This is
a concept that really struck me as something we don't
even give a second thought to that when a population
appears as a direct threat to your life, they do
not appear as lives, but as a threat to life.

(18:50):
Butler asks us to consider how this is shown with
how the world views and interprets Islam. Islam is portrayed
and seen by our media, whether it's implicit or explicit
as barbaric or pre modern as not having yet conformed
to the norms that make the human recognizable to the West,
to the American. So those who Americans kill by following

(19:12):
this line of thought are not quite human. They are
not quite alive, which means that we do not feel
the same horror and outrage over their loss of life
as we do the loss of life that bear national
or religious similarity to our own. And again, this isn't
a novel concept. In simple terms, it can be whittled

(19:33):
down to the reality that most people only care about
things that directly affect them or things that happen to
those who look like them. And again, maybe that seems
like an obvious realization to make about our society. But
what I'm asking you to do is not just accept
this as part of the human condition and to question
why it is like that in the first place. True

(19:56):
deep understanding of ourselves and of our humanity is to
dependent on us excavating ugly truths about ourselves and humanity
that we are not even maybe aware of. I think
this is something that bothers me about how Israel's narrative
or desion, this narrative of the conception of Israel almost
makes them seem sinless, they had done nothing wrong. The

(20:18):
Arabs or barbarians that didn't leave them alone. The same
can be said about how American history books talked about
Columbus and the Native American people here. Usually history is
written by those who want to appear in a better light,
and by default I feel like this makes them sinless
and pure and can do no wrong. But again, better

(20:42):
understanding of humanity means accepting that sometimes it is grotesque,
and I think that is something we need to accept
and understand. I think Israeli's need to accept that the
Nekba happened in order to move on from it. Things
like that is what I'm thinking about when I read
about this stuff. But anyways, tallal Asad is wondering why

(21:04):
modes of death dealing are apprehended differently, Why we object
to the deaths that are caused by suicide bombing more
forcefully and with greater moral outrage than we do those
deaths that are caused by aerial bombings. And then Butler
takes this back to how we differentiate populations, how some
are considered from the start very much alive and others

(21:25):
more questionably alive or as living figures of the threat
to life. Perhaps they're even regarded as quote socially dead,
which is the term that Jamaican American historian and sociologist
Orlando Patterson developed to describe the status of the slave
war relies on and perpetuates a way of dividing lives

(21:46):
into those who are worth defending, valuing, and grieving when
they are lost, and those that are not quite lives,
not quite valuable, recognizable, or mournable. And it should come
as no surprise that the death of ungrien fable lives
would cause deep outrage on the part of those who
understand and are seeing that their lives are not considered

(22:07):
to be lives in any meaningful sense of the word
in this world. Butler explains that although the logic of
self defense portrays such populations as threats to life as
we know it, they are themselves living populations with whom
our cohabitation presupposes a certain interdependency among us. What does

(22:28):
that mean, Well, it's about how interdependency is interpreted and executed,
and how it has concrete implications for who survives, who thrives,
who barely makes it, and who is eliminated or left
to die. Butler writes, I want to insist on this
interdependency precisely because when nations such as the US or

(22:51):
Israel argue that their survival is served by war, a
systematic error is committed. This is because war seeks to
deny the ongoing in irrefutable ways in which we are
all subject to one another, vulnerable to destruction by the other,
and in need of protection through multilateral and global agreements
based on the recognition of a shared precariousness. The reason

(23:15):
I am not free to destroy another, and indeed why
nations are not finally free to destroy one another, is
not only because it will lead to further destructive consequences.
That is doubtless true. But what may be finally more
true is that the subject I am is bound to
the subject I am not, That we each have the

(23:36):
power to destroy and to be destroyed, and that we
are bound to one another in this power and in
this precariousness. In this sense, we are all precarious lives.
That's essentially the takeaway that I got from the article
as a whole, or this blog post as a whole,

(23:58):
kind of just unifying us into the fact that we're
all the same and our divisions are truly man made.
Whether it's about grievable lives and ungrievable lives, or just
this concept of grievability in general, I think it's worth examining.
I think it's worth examining how now in real time
we're seeing how certain people value lives over others. This

(24:22):
is across the board. I'm not just talking about one
group of people. Grievable lives I think are this concept
for me, and tying grief intrinsically to life is essential
to understanding why it is life is valuable at all.
It's because it can be lost. And if life isn't
valuable to begin with, if that life that you're looking

(24:44):
at isn't valuable to begin with, you won't grieve it.
And I think this also can go back to how
we're seeing really dehumanizing language being used to specifically right
now describe Palestinians or Arabs or Muslims. This all leads
to dehumanizing a group of people to make them seem
inhuman and in a way unalive. So with all of that,

(25:07):
I hope this philosophical pivot was interesting to you. And yeah,
until next time, you know how it goes through Palestine.
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(25:29):
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