Speaker 1: All Zone Media. Hello, Welcome to it could happen here today.
Speaker 1: My episode is going to be a bit more philosophical.
Speaker 1: I love me some philosophy. I don't always understand it,
Speaker 1: but I do like it. And I read something recently
Speaker 1: that really stuck with me, especially in the context of
Speaker 1: what is currently going on right now in Palestine and
Speaker 1: the genocide and Gaza. I read something and I couldn't
Speaker 1: stop thinking about it, so I thought, let's just make
Speaker 1: an episode. So today I wanted to talk about this
Speaker 1: word I learned called grievability. It was coined by Judith
Speaker 1: Butler in this blog post from twenty fifteen, when Butler
Speaker 1: is asking the question when is life grievable? In twenty sixteen,
Speaker 1: Butler wrote a book called Frames of War. When is
Speaker 1: Life Grievable? And this is a quote from this book.
Speaker 1: One way of posing the question of who we are
Speaker 1: in these times of war is by asking whose lives
Speaker 1: are considered valuable, whose lives are mourned, and whose lives
Speaker 1: are considered ungrievable. We might think of war as dividing
Speaker 1: populations into those who are grievable in those who are not.
Speaker 1: An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because
Speaker 1: it has never lived, that is, it has never counted
Speaker 1: as a life at all. We can see the division
Speaker 1: of the globe into grievable and ungrievable lives from the
Speaker 1: perspective of those who wage war in order to defend
Speaker 1: the lives of certain communities and to defend them against
Speaker 1: the lives of others, even if it means taking those
Speaker 1: latter lives. So that quote kind of encompasses the idea
Speaker 1: of grievability. I really just thought it was poignant to
Speaker 1: talk about and relevant because we are being inundated with
Speaker 1: all these numbers every day of casualties and death count
Speaker 1: and collateral damage. And people accept these things because it's
Speaker 1: part of being human. It's just the way war is.
Speaker 1: But I really don't think we should accept that as
Speaker 1: the reality. I think that makes us callous. And I
Speaker 1: think accepting human death, no matter in what context, is
Speaker 1: a little bit inhuman And so I think maybe that's
Speaker 1: why this concept fascinated me, because tying grief to the
Speaker 1: concept of being alive, it truly is indicative of if
Speaker 1: that life is worth something to you or to the world.
Speaker 1: And so we're reading and hearing about all these lives lost,
Speaker 1: and we're giving these numbers and stories, and these numbers
Speaker 1: are repeated every day, and they increase every day, and
Speaker 1: this repetition seems endless and impossible to change. And Butler
Speaker 1: is saying that we don't often consider the precarious character
Speaker 1: of the lives lost in war. And Butler defines precariousness
Speaker 1: as the following. To say that a life is precarious
Speaker 1: requires not only that a life be apprehended as a life,
Speaker 1: but also that precariousness be an aspect of what is
Speaker 1: apprehended in what is the living normatively construed. I am
Speaker 1: arguing that there ought to be a more inclusive and
Speaker 1: egalitarian way of recognizing precariousness, and that this should take
Speaker 1: form as concrete social policy regarding such issues as shelter work, food,
Speaker 1: medical care, and legal status. Butler goes on to explain
Speaker 1: that although this initially seems paradoxical, precariousness itself actually cannot
Speaker 1: be properly recognized. Butler says, it can be apprehended, taken in, encountered,
Speaker 1: and it can be presupposed by certain norms of recognition,
Speaker 1: just as it can be refused by such norms. But
Speaker 1: the main recognition of precariousness should be as this shared
Speaker 1: condition of human life, so precariousness being a condition that
Speaker 1: links human life and humans to non human animals. So
Speaker 1: for nat to say that a life is injurable, that
Speaker 1: it can be lost, hurt, destroyed, or systematically neglected to
Speaker 1: the point of death is to underscore not only the
Speaker 1: finitude of a life and that death is certain, but
Speaker 1: also the precariousness of life, that life requires various social
Speaker 1: and economic conditions to be met in order to be
Speaker 1: sustained as a life. Precariousness implies that living socially means
Speaker 1: that one's life is always, in some sense in the
Speaker 1: hands of the other. It implies exposure both to those
Speaker 1: we know and to those we do not know, a
Speaker 1: dependency on people we know or barely know, or know
Speaker 1: not at all. This existential reality that everything ends and
Speaker 1: everything is temporary. This encapsulates our relation to death and
Speaker 1: to life. Precariousness underscores what Butler calls our quote radical
Speaker 1: substitution ability and anonymity, and that dying and death is
Speaker 1: just as socially facilitated a humans persisting and flourishing. So
Speaker 1: Butler is saying it's not that we are born and
Speaker 1: then later become precarious, but rather that precariousness is intrinsic
Speaker 1: with birth itself, and birth is by definition precarious. It
Speaker 1: means that it matters whether a newly born infant survives,
Speaker 1: and its survival is dependent on what we might call
Speaker 1: a social network of hands. Precisely because a living being
Speaker 1: may die, it is necessary to care for that being
Speaker 1: so it may live. I put the following sentence in
Speaker 1: bold because I think it's kind of underlying what I'm
Speaker 1: trying to say, even though it sounds really simple. But
Speaker 1: only under conditions in which the loss would matter does
Speaker 1: the value of the life appear. And again, maybe it
Speaker 1: sounds simple, but I don't think we actually absorb the
Speaker 1: meaning of what that means to value a life and
Speaker 1: to mourn a life. And this is how we come
Speaker 1: to the idea of grievability, the idea that grievability is
Speaker 1: a pre supposition for the life that matters. Butler gives
Speaker 1: us this example, so let's think about this. An infant
Speaker 1: comes into the world, is sustained in and sustained by
Speaker 1: that world as an infant, and through to adulthood and
Speaker 1: old age, and finally, eventually it dies. We imagine that
Speaker 1: when the child is wanted, there is celebration at the
Speaker 1: beginning of life. But there can be no celebration without
Speaker 1: an implicit understanding that the life is grievable, that it
Speaker 1: would be grieved if it were lost, that this future
Speaker 1: possibility is installed as the condition of its life. Life
Speaker 1: is celebrated because it can be lost an ordinary language,
Speaker 1: Butler says, grief attends the life that has already been
Speaker 1: lived and presupposes that life as having ended. So the
Speaker 1: value of life comes from the reality and certainty that
Speaker 1: it will end. And if we think about this idea
Speaker 1: of possibility of future, this lack of possibility that has
Speaker 1: happens when death happens. Grievability is a condition of a
Speaker 1: life's emergence and sustenance this future concept that a life
Speaker 1: has been lived is presupposed at the beginning of a
Speaker 1: life that has only begun to be lived. In other words,
Speaker 1: Butler says, this will be a life that will have
Speaker 1: been lived. Is the presupposition of a grievable life, which
Speaker 1: means that this will be a life that can be
Speaker 1: regarded as life and sustained by that regard. I know
Speaker 1: it sounds heady, and I really had to read this
Speaker 1: multiple times to even try to comprehend it. But essentially,
Speaker 1: without grievability, without the impulse to mourn a life, there
Speaker 1: is no life, or rather, there is something living that
Speaker 1: is other than life. This other than life thing is
Speaker 1: a life that will never have been lived in the
Speaker 1: first place, because it's not mourned, and it's sustained by
Speaker 1: no regard, no testimony, and it is ungrieved when it
Speaker 1: is lost. The unease and anxiety and at apprehension of
Speaker 1: grievability precedes and makes possible the unease and anxiety and
Speaker 1: apprehension of precarious life, and so grievability precedes and makes
Speaker 1: possible the apprehension of the living being as living exposed
Speaker 1: to non life. From the start, to put it in
Speaker 1: maybe a simpler way for me to understand even is
Speaker 1: that a life is worth grieving because we already know
Speaker 1: it will die, and that life is worth celebrating because
Speaker 1: it has already been exposed to death or the implication
Speaker 1: of certain death. From the start. It is pretty heady,
Speaker 1: but maybe I'll just leave you to marinate with that
Speaker 1: during a break and we can get more heady when
Speaker 1: we get back. Okay, we're back. Let's go back to
Speaker 1: the idea of war. One way of posing the question
Speaker 1: of who we are in these times of war is
Speaker 1: by asking whose lives are considered valuable, whose lives are mourned,
Speaker 1: and whose lives are considered unagrievable. War is essentially the
Speaker 1: division of populations into those who are a grievable and
Speaker 1: those who are not. An ungrievable life is one that
Speaker 1: cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is,
Speaker 1: it has never counted as life at all. And we
Speaker 1: see this division of the entire world into grievable and
Speaker 1: ungrievable lives when we look at the perspective of those
Speaker 1: who wage war in order to defend their certain communities.
Speaker 1: This is kind of reiterating the quote that I'd started
Speaker 1: with at the top from twenty sixteen, but essentially to
Speaker 1: defend these certain communities against the life of others, it
Speaker 1: usually implies the taking of those other lives. Butler here
Speaker 1: makes a reference to nine to eleven, explating that after
Speaker 1: the attacks of nine to eleven, the media showed us
Speaker 1: graphic pictures of those who died along with their names,
Speaker 1: their stories, and the reactions of their families. Public grieving
Speaker 1: was dedicated to making these images iconic for the nation,
Speaker 1: which meant that, of course, there was considerably less public
Speaker 1: grieving for let's say, non US nationals, and none at
Speaker 1: all for illegal workers. Butler says the differential distribution of
Speaker 1: public grieving is a political issue of enormous significance, And
Speaker 1: Butler asks, why is it that governments so often seek
Speaker 1: to regulate and control who will be publicly grievable and
Speaker 1: who will not? Because it means something to state and
Speaker 1: to show the name of someone who has died, to
Speaker 1: put together some remnants of a life, and to publicly
Speaker 1: display and draw attention to the loss. So Butler's asking,
Speaker 1: in this context, what would happen if those killed in
Speaker 1: war were to be grieved in such an oath? Why
Speaker 1: is it that we are not given the names of
Speaker 1: all the war dead, including those the US has killed,
Speaker 1: of whom we will never have the image, the name,
Speaker 1: the story, never have a testimonial shard of their life,
Speaker 1: nothing to see, to touch, to know. Open grieving is
Speaker 1: bound up with outrage. Outrage in the face of injustice
Speaker 1: or of unbearable loss, has enormous political potential. Butler draws
Speaker 1: a similarity here to Plato. Apparently, one of the reasons
Speaker 1: Plato wanted to ban the poets from the Republic is
Speaker 1: that he thought that if citizens went too often to
Speaker 1: watch tragedy, they would weep over the losses they saw,
Speaker 1: and that such open and public mourning, in disrupting the
Speaker 1: order and hierarchy of the soul, would disrupt the order
Speaker 1: and hierarchy of political authority as well. And I didn't
Speaker 1: know this, but to put it in that context is
Speaker 1: really fascinating to me, because it's essentially saying that if
Speaker 1: we expose human beings to the reality of tragedy in life,
Speaker 1: they might care too much and start to fuck up
Speaker 1: our politics. Essentially, so, whether we are speaking about open
Speaker 1: grief or outrage, we are talking about effective or emotional
Speaker 1: responses that are highly regulated by regimes of power and
Speaker 1: sometimes subject to explicit censorship. The blog post I'm referring
Speaker 1: to that Judith Butler wrote was written in twenty fifteen.
Speaker 1: So Butler uses the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as
Speaker 1: examples of what they're trying to say. For the wars
Speaker 1: in Iraq, in Afghanistan. We saw how emotion was regulated
Speaker 1: to support both the war effort and more specifically, nationalists belonging.
Speaker 1: When the photos of Abu grab were first released in
Speaker 1: the US, conservative television pundits argued that it would be
Speaker 1: un American to show them because we were not supposed
Speaker 1: to have graphic evidence of the acts of torture the
Speaker 1: US has committed. We were not supposed to know that
Speaker 1: the US had violated in nationally recognized human rights. It
Speaker 1: was Unamerican to show these photos, an Unamerican to glean
Speaker 1: information from them as to how the war was being conducted.
Speaker 1: Bill O'Reilly thought that the photos would create a negative
Speaker 1: image of the US and that we had an obligation
Speaker 1: to defend a positive image of the country. Donald Rumsfeld
Speaker 1: said something similar, suggesting it was anti American to display
Speaker 1: the photos. Of course, these idiots didn't consider, and neither
Speaker 1: did the vast majority of people in power. But the
Speaker 1: American public should have a right to know about the
Speaker 1: activities of its military, and it should have the right
Speaker 1: to judge a war. Understanding and judging a war on
Speaker 1: the basis of full evidence is or at least it
Speaker 1: should be part of the democratic tradition of participation and deliberation.
Speaker 1: So what was this really saying Butler's asking they say,
Speaker 1: it seems to me that those who sought to limit
Speaker 1: the power of them image in this instance also sought
Speaker 1: to limit the power of effect of outrage, knowing full
Speaker 1: well that it could and would turn public opinion against
Speaker 1: the war in Iraq as it died it did. I
Speaker 1: feel like this is especially fascinating and parallel to what
Speaker 1: we're seeing now with the people in Palestine broadcasting horrific
Speaker 1: images of what is happening to them because of the
Speaker 1: state of Israel, and how there is selective outrage because
Speaker 1: it is almost impolite to show or proliferate these images
Speaker 1: that only show reality. It really feels like people are
Speaker 1: only outraged when they consider a life grievable, which takes
Speaker 1: us to this whole topic. It brings us back to
Speaker 1: the question of whose lives are regarded as mournable, as grievable,
Speaker 1: and whose lives are regarded as worthy of protection, whose
Speaker 1: lives are regarded as belonging to subjects with rights that
Speaker 1: should be honored. This ties in direct to the idea
Speaker 1: of how effect or emotion is regulated and what we
Speaker 1: mean by the regulation of emotion at all. Butler references
Speaker 1: the anthropologist Talal Assad, who wrote a book about suicide bombing.
Speaker 1: In this book, the first question he poses is why
Speaker 1: do we feel horror and moral repulsion in the face
Speaker 1: of suicide bombing when we do not always feel the
Speaker 1: same way in the face of state sponsored violence. He
Speaker 1: asks this question not in order to say that these
Speaker 1: forms of violence are the same or equatable, or even
Speaker 1: to say that we ought to feel the same moral
Speaker 1: outrage in relation to both. But Asad finds it curious,
Speaker 1: as does Butler, that our moral responses, responses that first
Speaker 1: take form as effect, are tacitly regulated by certain kinds
Speaker 1: of interpretive frameworks. His thesis is that we feel more
Speaker 1: horror and moral revulsion in the face of lives lost
Speaker 1: under certain conditions than under certain others. Asad explains that,
Speaker 1: for instance, if someone kills or is killed in war,
Speaker 1: and the war is state sponsored, and we invest the
Speaker 1: state with legitimacy, then we consider the death lamentable, sad, unfortunate,
Speaker 1: but ultimately not radically unjust. And yet if the violence
Speaker 1: is perpetrated by insurgency groups regarded as illegitimate, that our
Speaker 1: emotion invariably changes, or so ASAD assumes. Asad is saying
Speaker 1: something here that is really important about how the politics
Speaker 1: of moral responsiveness really feed into public perception. That what
Speaker 1: we feel is in part conditioned by how we interpret
Speaker 1: the world around us, that how we interpret what we
Speaker 1: feel actually can and does alter the feeling itself. If
Speaker 1: we can accept our emotion could be affected and structured
Speaker 1: by things we do not fully understand, can this help
Speaker 1: us understand why it is that we might feel horror
Speaker 1: in the face of certain losses, but in difference or
Speaker 1: even righteousness in the light of others. Conditions of war
Speaker 1: bring something really interesting here, this feeling of heightened nationalism.
Speaker 1: In this feeling of heightened nationalism, it's as though our
Speaker 1: existence is bound with others with whom we find some
Speaker 1: kind of national affinity for who are recognizable to us
Speaker 1: and who can conform to certain culturally specific notions about
Speaker 1: what the culturally recognizable human is. And sure, maybe some
Speaker 1: of you are like, well, this is really obvious. Of course,
Speaker 1: some people care more about people who look like them
Speaker 1: or about things that directly affect them. But what I'm
Speaker 1: arguing is that I can't accept that as reality. I
Speaker 1: don't think we should accept humans as by default callous.
Speaker 1: There's no way change happens that way. I think we
Speaker 1: have to question why we unconsciously are more outraged by
Speaker 1: certain losses than others, or why the public is this
Speaker 1: way even if you are not. Oh, that's a lot
Speaker 1: of stuff, it's a lot of information. Let's take our
Speaker 1: second break. We can just marinate with all of that,
Speaker 1: and uh, we'll be right back to wrap us up. Okay,
Speaker 1: we're back. So we discussed the differentiation of the population
Speaker 1: of the world into grievable and unagrievable lives, and now
Speaker 1: we are going to differentiate between the populations on whom
Speaker 1: your life and existence depend on, and those populations represent
Speaker 1: a direct threat to your life in existence. This is
Speaker 1: a concept that really struck me as something we don't
Speaker 1: even give a second thought to that when a population
Speaker 1: appears as a direct threat to your life, they do
Speaker 1: not appear as lives, but as a threat to life.
Speaker 1: Butler asks us to consider how this is shown with
Speaker 1: how the world views and interprets Islam. Islam is portrayed
Speaker 1: and seen by our media, whether it's implicit or explicit
Speaker 1: as barbaric or pre modern as not having yet conformed
Speaker 1: to the norms that make the human recognizable to the West,
Speaker 1: to the American. So those who Americans kill by following
Speaker 1: this line of thought are not quite human. They are
Speaker 1: not quite alive, which means that we do not feel
Speaker 1: the same horror and outrage over their loss of life
Speaker 1: as we do the loss of life that bear national
Speaker 1: or religious similarity to our own. And again, this isn't
Speaker 1: a novel concept. In simple terms, it can be whittled
Speaker 1: down to the reality that most people only care about
Speaker 1: things that directly affect them or things that happen to
Speaker 1: those who look like them. And again, maybe that seems
Speaker 1: like an obvious realization to make about our society. But
Speaker 1: what I'm asking you to do is not just accept
Speaker 1: this as part of the human condition and to question
Speaker 1: why it is like that in the first place. True
Speaker 1: deep understanding of ourselves and of our humanity is to
Speaker 1: dependent on us excavating ugly truths about ourselves and humanity
Speaker 1: that we are not even maybe aware of. I think
Speaker 1: this is something that bothers me about how Israel's narrative
Speaker 1: or desion, this narrative of the conception of Israel almost
Speaker 1: makes them seem sinless, they had done nothing wrong. The
Speaker 1: Arabs or barbarians that didn't leave them alone. The same
Speaker 1: can be said about how American history books talked about
Speaker 1: Columbus and the Native American people here. Usually history is
Speaker 1: written by those who want to appear in a better light,
Speaker 1: and by default I feel like this makes them sinless
Speaker 1: and pure and can do no wrong. But again, better
Speaker 1: understanding of humanity means accepting that sometimes it is grotesque,
Speaker 1: and I think that is something we need to accept
Speaker 1: and understand. I think Israeli's need to accept that the
Speaker 1: Nekba happened in order to move on from it. Things
Speaker 1: like that is what I'm thinking about when I read
Speaker 1: about this stuff. But anyways, tallal Asad is wondering why
Speaker 1: modes of death dealing are apprehended differently, Why we object
Speaker 1: to the deaths that are caused by suicide bombing more
Speaker 1: forcefully and with greater moral outrage than we do those
Speaker 1: deaths that are caused by aerial bombings. And then Butler
Speaker 1: takes this back to how we differentiate populations, how some
Speaker 1: are considered from the start very much alive and others
Speaker 1: more questionably alive or as living figures of the threat
Speaker 1: to life. Perhaps they're even regarded as quote socially dead,
Speaker 1: which is the term that Jamaican American historian and sociologist
Speaker 1: Orlando Patterson developed to describe the status of the slave
Speaker 1: war relies on and perpetuates a way of dividing lives
Speaker 1: into those who are worth defending, valuing, and grieving when
Speaker 1: they are lost, and those that are not quite lives,
Speaker 1: not quite valuable, recognizable, or mournable. And it should come
Speaker 1: as no surprise that the death of ungrien fable lives
Speaker 1: would cause deep outrage on the part of those who
Speaker 1: understand and are seeing that their lives are not considered
Speaker 1: to be lives in any meaningful sense of the word
Speaker 1: in this world. Butler explains that although the logic of
Speaker 1: self defense portrays such populations as threats to life as
Speaker 1: we know it, they are themselves living populations with whom
Speaker 1: our cohabitation presupposes a certain interdependency among us. What does
Speaker 1: that mean, Well, it's about how interdependency is interpreted and executed,
Speaker 1: and how it has concrete implications for who survives, who thrives,
Speaker 1: who barely makes it, and who is eliminated or left
Speaker 1: to die. Butler writes, I want to insist on this
Speaker 1: interdependency precisely because when nations such as the US or
Speaker 1: Israel argue that their survival is served by war, a
Speaker 1: systematic error is committed. This is because war seeks to
Speaker 1: deny the ongoing in irrefutable ways in which we are
Speaker 1: all subject to one another, vulnerable to destruction by the other,
Speaker 1: and in need of protection through multilateral and global agreements
Speaker 1: based on the recognition of a shared precariousness. The reason
Speaker 1: I am not free to destroy another, and indeed why
Speaker 1: nations are not finally free to destroy one another, is
Speaker 1: not only because it will lead to further destructive consequences.
Speaker 1: That is doubtless true. But what may be finally more
Speaker 1: true is that the subject I am is bound to
Speaker 1: the subject I am not, That we each have the
Speaker 1: power to destroy and to be destroyed, and that we
Speaker 1: are bound to one another in this power and in
Speaker 1: this precariousness. In this sense, we are all precarious lives.
Speaker 1: That's essentially the takeaway that I got from the article
Speaker 1: as a whole, or this blog post as a whole,
Speaker 1: kind of just unifying us into the fact that we're
Speaker 1: all the same and our divisions are truly man made.
Speaker 1: Whether it's about grievable lives and ungrievable lives, or just
Speaker 1: this concept of grievability in general, I think it's worth examining.
Speaker 1: I think it's worth examining how now in real time
Speaker 1: we're seeing how certain people value lives over others. This
Speaker 1: is across the board. I'm not just talking about one
Speaker 1: group of people. Grievable lives I think are this concept
Speaker 1: for me, and tying grief intrinsically to life is essential
Speaker 1: to understanding why it is life is valuable at all.
Speaker 1: It's because it can be lost. And if life isn't
Speaker 1: valuable to begin with, if that life that you're looking
Speaker 1: at isn't valuable to begin with, you won't grieve it.
Speaker 1: And I think this also can go back to how
Speaker 1: we're seeing really dehumanizing language being used to specifically right
Speaker 1: now describe Palestinians or Arabs or Muslims. This all leads
Speaker 1: to dehumanizing a group of people to make them seem
Speaker 1: inhuman and in a way unalive. So with all of that,
Speaker 1: I hope this philosophical pivot was interesting to you. And yeah,
Speaker 1: until next time, you know how it goes through Palestine.
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