In Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Judith Butler revisits her early work on performativity and uses it to illuminate the politics of the street and the plaza. She urges us to think about the political effects that are produced when bodies—not just voices, discourses, or arguments—appear on the public stage. The main thesis of the book is that acting in concert can contest hierarchical distributions of power and the notions of liveability and normality that underpin them. The book, which is based on a series of lectures, links performativity with precarity. Butler focuses on the demonstrations, occupations, and vigils that expose the material body and highlight its need for shelter, food, care, and employment.

Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly is much more than a materialist version of liberal arguments in favor of the right to free speech and assembly. It is a nuanced discussion of a wide range of themes, including gender, precarity, public space, sociality, interdependence, justice, and the human. The book is extremely readable. It maintains the conversational style of the lecture format, which makes it an excellent introduction for students who are new to Butler’s work. The focus on the politics of public space also offers new insights to her core audience.

How does the body “speak” politically? It does so in at least two ways. According to Butler, assembled bodies can have a “signifying effect.” She notes that even when people stand silently, assembled bodies “say” we are not disposable. This dimension of assembly fits well with the conventional account of political activity, and the legal doctrine of free speech encompasses both speech and symbolic action that expresses dissent. While the courts recognize the expressive content of public assembly, protestors often emphasize the intrinsic value of the practice itself. The Occupy protestors, for example, made signs and issued press releases, but they also set up free “stores” and shared the labor of providing food and care. They enacted alternatives. According to Butler, gathering itself signifies in excess of what is said because it is a plural form of performativity (p. 8).

Another way that the body speaks politically is through exposure (p. 83). Butler draws our attention to the ways that bodies on the street contest and negate existing forms of legitimacy. Transgendered people, veiled women, and homeless people, among others expose and challenge the erasure of their identities simply by appearing in public. She points out that performativity should not be understood primarily as volitional subversion; it also encompasses appearances through which one “freely exercises the right to be who one already is” (p. 61).

This exposure may be driven by agency or necessity, but in both cases it renders the subjects vulnerable to violence. This is one of the reasons why assembly is so important. By coming together in large numbers, individuals are less vulnerable to harm. Concentrating bodies in public space also stages an event, which makes the underlying concerns visible to others. The audience includes people who view it directly and the much larger number whose exposure comes indirectly through media coverage. For Butler, the material and the virtual are interdependent.

Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly is a fairly short but still wide-ranging book. The chapters focus on gender, the politics of the street, precarious life, bodily vulnerability, “we the people,” and ethical responsibility in the face of structural injustice. I will focus on two issues that recur throughout the book and that may be of particular interest to political theorists: The first is Butler’s reading of Hannah Arendt and the second is normativity.

The book could be read as a dialogue with—or even critique of—Arendt and Arendtianism. Like Arendt, Butler is interested in what becomes possible when people appear and act together in public. In contrast to Arendt, however, Butler is also deeply concerned with the social conditions that enable some people to appear and to act and others to be excluded, invisible, or silenced. She identifies exclusion as part of the structural position of precarity and draws attention to its more extreme physical manifestations—the prison and the way that borders prevent the formation of certain kinds of publics. Butler also rejects Arendt’s strong distinction between the social, the private, and the public (p. 44). In fact, the concept of precarity could be read as an attempt to dismantle these categories and show how the fulfillment of or disregard for material needs is intrinsically social and political.

In spite of these differences, Butler also acknowledges her debt to Arendt. Her approach to assembly is inspired by the affirmative vision of public life and freedom in On Revolution. At times Butler reads Arendt against the grain to highlight the dimensions of Arendt’s work that fit best with Butler’s own normative project. For example, Butler notes that for Arendt, “unwilled proximity and unchosen cohabitation are preconditions of our political existence.” According to Butler, Arendt builds on this point and derives an obligation “to invest institutions with the demand to seek to make all lives liveable and equally so” (pp. 114–115). Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly is lightly footnoted, so it is difficult to pinpoint the textual evidence for this latter claim, but it is hard to reconcile with other passages in On Revolution where Arendt treats the goal of making lives equally liveable as an impossible demand that destroys the political. Levinas, the other thinker referenced in the book, seems like a more promising resource for help theorizing precarity because Levinas’s concepts—proximity, alterity, vulnerability, and asymmetry—help us get at what is missing in liberal theories of equality.

According to Butler, politics should be oriented toward the making and preserving of the conditions that allow liveability. Butler’s critique of precarity has a lot in common with normative theories that emphasize basic social rights and the need to secure the conditions of human flourishing. Butler’s approach shows us how to move beyond an unproductive dichotomy between normative and political or critical approaches to theory. She is unwilling to dismiss ethics and normativity simply because some approaches to these concepts have been normalizing, in the pejorative sense of that term. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly calls for a new norm of liveability that “is not a form of normality” (p. 33). Is that possible? Yes and no. Norms must be normalizing, but they can be understood as both created and discovered and therefore subject to contestation, revision, and re-imagination.

Butler suggests that shared exposure to precarity could be one foundation for equality and reciprocal obligation (p. 218), but of course precarity is not necessarily shared and the privileged have devoted enormous resources to shielding themselves and their families from such exposure. The growth of elite private schools and residential enclaves are just two concrete manifestations of the move away from solidarity and the rejection of even indirect exposure to the lives of others. These strategies are deeply problematic but, at the same time, it is not surprising that they would be embraced by people who live in a society in which precarity is widespread and growing. Can the solidarity generated through the occupation of public space inspire a political movement that weaves a safety net, integrates schools, and equalizes workplaces? This will not be easy, and Butler is right to remind us that words are not enough. To build a new, more liveable way of life, we must enact the very principles we seek to realize (p. 218).