Precariousness and Grievability

word I learned called grievability. It was coined by Judith 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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,

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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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

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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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.

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

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

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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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

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 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, I hope this philosophical pivot was interesting to you. And yeah, until next time, you know how it goes through Palestine. It could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.

For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It could Happen Here, updated monthly at cool zonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.