3:AM Magazine

By Christopher Madden.

Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?, Verso, 2009.

From Subjects of Desire via Gender Trouble and The Psychic Life of Power, Judith Butler has consistently critiqued notions of subject formation and the distribution of power in social life. In particular, her groundbreaking analyses of gender performativity and the politics of LGBT life have been defined against the heteronormative powers that frame them. A line can be traced through her work that fosters vigilance against the ways in which power and subjecthood are framed by discourses beyond their control. Notions of the frame and processes of framing provide the analytical tropes of Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, a text which gives the impression that the writer has eschewed what some consider to be her stylistic opacity to speak all the more urgently to contemporary global concerns.

Butler notes that Frames of War expands on her previous Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence. Both texts could almost constitute companion volumes in that they provide an extended philosophical response to the continuing conflicts waged in the name of ‘freedom’ by the United States and Britain. In this new book, Butler fully harnesses the trope of the frame to gauge the extent to which such physical conflicts are underpinned by other, much more discrete, sexual and cultural ‘wars’. Recent conflicts have, however, demonstrated that the West’s conception of the other is as a disposable life representing an antithetical civilisation.

Butler argues that for a life to be grieved, it must first be ‘apprehended’. The conditions guiding the apprehension of a life are inevitably ‘politically saturated’. This frame is complicated by the question of Being that precedes the state of knowledge in which ontology determines our epistemological capacity. Three terms underscore the book’s argument: apprehension, recognisability, and intelligibility. Defined as the ‘domain of the knowable’, intelligibility determines the possibility of recognition in the form of a ‘scene between two subjects’. For Levinas, ethical responsibility towards the other is formulated by an encounter with the face of the other. Echoing this, Butler’s notion of the ‘precariousness’ formulating our political and social responsibilities moves away from the anthropocentric paradigm of a life as bios towards a generalised condition that is directed at facilitating ‘persistence and flourishing’:

Precarious life implies life as a conditioned process, and not as the internal feature of a monadic individual or any anthropocentric conceit. Our obligations are precisely to the conditions that make life possible, not to ‘life itself’.

Defined in this way, precariousness was highlighted by abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, in which persistence and flourishing were negated by the structure of lives that went unrecognised because the other remained unintelligible. Butler refers to the sense of the frame as that which surrounds a painting or photographic image, guiding and containing interpretation, in the third chapter’s reading via Susan Sontag of the Abu Ghraib images. The ‘embedded photography’ of contemporary war, she asserts, restricts the visual field and the field of perception. The dissemination of images of human rights abuses at Abu Ghraib radically subverts the ideological fixity of embedded photography. These images realise the sense in which, as Butler argues earlier in the text, the frame is characterised by ‘perpetual breakage’. That the Abu Ghraib images exceed the frame of embedded photography means that norms of recognisability are likewise overturned. Butler therefore disagrees with Sontag’s view that the photographic image carries only an affective power that ultimately resists the narrative coherence – and thus of understanding generally – of paintings or photographs with captions and explicative text. ‘The photograph has already determined what will count within the frame’, Butler argues, ‘and this act of delimitation is surely interpretive’.

The Abu Ghraib images framed the imperialist West’s idea of the Islamic subject. Misogyny and homophobia underlined the torture precisely to exploit the taboos on homosexuality and cultural attitudes towards women in Islam and turn this against the captive in ritual humiliation. Sexual and cultural politics coalesce in the West’s civilisational mission in which Islam is viewed as lying outside modernity. Crudely put, US soldiers at Abu Ghraib are self-proclaimed subjects of modernity because they overcome homophobia and misogyny whilst simultaneously bolstering these attitudes. Butler asks whether this ‘clash of civilisations’ is nothing other than a sexual contest in which modernity is determined by the more sexually virile escapades of the US soldier against the sexually prohibitive Muslim. This frame of war reveals that sexual politics are rooted in current conceptions of modernity, and it would be difficult in this light to deny Butler’s contention that sexual and gender rights are being ‘instrumentalised in coercive arguments against immigrant communities’. For example, Butler rigorously critiques the citizen test in the Netherlands that determines the immigrant’s modernity through responses to images of gay kissing. This dovetailing of anti-Muslim sentiment with sexual rights demands a reorientation of Left politics beyond the ‘liberal antimonies on which it currently founders’. Butler proposes that this can be achieved through coalitional models of citizenship between minorities whose values and rights normally conflict with each other in some sort of ‘stand-off’.

But can such forums as ‘Gayhane’ night at Kreuzberg’s SO36, to which Butler refers, in which gay Muslims are able to enjoy (though only momentarily) unfettered personhood in flight from rigidly heteronormative households, resolve what could be called the dialectic between queer and non-queer Islamic communities? Europe’s Muslims are not alone in their ideological opposition to LGBT life, with Christianity in Britain continually threatening the Labour government’s equality agenda and demanding special exemptions from legislation. Thus it is proved that in some considerable respects, Christianity itself fails the test of modernity. Examples from Pope Ratzinger’s bad scholarship on gender and queer theory allow Butler to make just this point. It would be difficult in practical, everyday terms, not to envisage one set of rights succeeding over another. How possible is it to overcome the ‘impasse’ that Butler rejects as the stopgap to coalitional citizenship without ceding priority to one group over another?

Such a scenario would be installed by violence to one community whilst simultaneously attempting to prevent violence to the other. Frames of War ends by questioning the subject’s responsiveness to non-violence against the violence inherent in the norms that construct identity. Butler modulates her argument about precariousness as a generalised condition by altering ‘construction’ to ‘performativity’. Our response to the call for non-violence is thus more reflexive to the structure of frame-breaking, iterable norms. Butler concludes her magisterial analysis with a call for both individual subjects and nations states to be persistently open to the need for more effectively articulated rage in light of the precariousness at the root of our survivability.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Christopher Madden is completing a PhD on W. G. Sebald at the University of Sheffield.

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Friday, April 2nd, 2010.