Abstract
The following brief commentary looks closely at a 6.58-minute YouTube clip that performs an eclipse and effects an ellipsis.
On 19 June 2010, the American philosopher Judith Butler was due to be awarded the Prize for Civil Courage by the organizers of the annual Berlin Christopher Street Day (CSD). 1 The award ceremony, part of a densely scheduled sequence of speeches and concerts, took place on a stage erected in the very centre and tourist heart of Berlin, at the Brandenburg Gate. The ceremonial interlude opened with an honorific address by Renate Künast, a leading member of the German Green party and promising candidate in the city’s next mayoral elections. Künast, however, seemed under-prepared, unable even to correctly pronounce Butler’s name, as evidenced in coverage of the event aired two days later on ‘Kulturzeit’, a daily cultural television programme broadcast by the public TV station, 3Sat, which was thereafter quickly posted onto YouTube. 2 Also recorded in this coverage is the philosopher’s refusal to accept the trophy handed to her by Künast. Instead, Butler begins to read a speech, written in German, explaining why she is declining the award. 3
These preliminary scenes are missing from an amateur video clip uploaded to YouTube by someone calling herself or himself ‘andrenarchy’, a day before the 3Sat feature. It covers most of Butler’s statement and a few minutes of the awkward and baffled reactions by CSD officials Jan Salloch and Ole Lehmann in its aftermath. 4 Irrespective of the impoverished, casual quality of this piece of footage, probably filmed with a mobile phone camera from a vantage point in the crowd at Pariser Platz, the clip has become a key reference in an international context of multi-layered political controversies over homonationalism 5 and the politics of LGBTIQ 6 organizations, migrating to numerous activist blogs and websites such as No Homonationalism and La Monodramie Dialectique. 7
The camera is directed towards the large outdoor stage about 30 meters away, with lots of people moving in front of it. The image is unstable, the frame keeps bouncing; as we try to make out what we are seeing, we begin to understand that we are listening to a female voice speaking in German, pronouncing her words slowly and very clearly. The subtitles read: The host organizations [of the Berlin CSD] refuse to understand anti-racist politics as an essential part of their work. 8 The image continues to bounce, heads move across the foreground, people shout and clap their hands. I am sorry that, under these circumstances, I am unable to accept this award. People continue to cheer, shout and clap enthusiastically. Butler leaves the stage. Then, two male voices, relayed by the sound system, start to speak rapidly in an agitated and incoherent manner: Nobody can say that our CSD is not political … We say clearly as CSD Berlin we refuse vehemently – I feel whipsawed personally – the allegation of racism. This is simply not true. We hear people booing and hooting. The amplified voices (belonging, it appears, to two men wearing wings on their suits) respond to this depreciatory noise: And you can scream as much as you want. It’s not true. To be honest, you are not the majority here. You – are – not – the – majority. More booing and hooting. We have and we will in the future give you the hand to work with you. The problem is you seem not to wish that. However, we’ll just continue our program … But such things enrich events like these, but whatever will come, worldwide or in Berlin, we all pull together. In the foreground of the frame, a woman in the crowd holds her arms fists up, waving her middle finger at the speakers onstage. It will be like that forever and thus it stays. Guys, we have a wonderful program awaiting for us, and we shouldn’t be discouraged to enjoy it.
Our interest in this clip and its contextualization on YouTube and elsewhere on the web, by various users and commentators, resides in its dense and paradoxical status. The video is visually poor and almost useless in terms of an articulation of the struggle against the CSD’s homonationalist agenda or, for that matter, as an attack against the racist undercurrents of its ‘sexual exceptionalism’ (Puar, 2007). Yet the clip, enmeshed in the machinic assemblage and algorithmicized environment of the Web 2.0, makes tangible the social and technological production of an ‘eclipse’ – in the sense of an obsfucation – while at the same time informing a complex discursive constellation that involves various actors, claims and histories. With Jasbir Puar (2010), who commented on Butler’s refusal and its ‘celebration’ soon after the event, reminding readers of the ‘citational practices that continue to fuel academic/activist hierarchies that often ignore (or trump) foundational and risky work by queers of color’, we speak of this constellation as one of many ‘complex assemblages of knowledge production’ that need to be brought to the fore in the current debates around queer, anti-racist and anti-militarist politics.
One of the actors in these assemblages of knowledge production is of course the philosopher Judith Butler, who gave a speech and performed, as such, an act of repudiation. This multi-layered speech act, however, relied on (was generated and enabled by) years of intensive work by other actors – queer and anti-racist groups, activists, theorists (GLADT, LesMigraS, SUSPECT, and ReachOut) – whom Butler credits explicitly (see the transcript). Her decision to refuse the award was a direct outcome of discussions with the activists organized in the collectives named in her speech. The issue is one of representation. Who is admitted into the public image of the CSD and who is not? Who is being included under the CSD banner and who is excluded?
Butler has been clear in interviews subsequent to her Berlin refusal speech about the extent to which the advocacy of LGBTIQ rights and lifestyles tends to invisibilize queer and trans people of colour and often plays into the hands of nationalist and EU-racisms and militarisms proliferating anti-Muslim racisms (see Hamann, 2010). Her appearance and statement of 19 June 2010 precipitated a remarkable amount of media coverage, in mainstream daily newspapers, public television, blogs and mailing lists, for example. The sheer quantity of coverage was astounding, but more perplexing was what we perceive to be the precipitous production of an eclipse. With the significant exception of blogs written from anti-racist or migrant perspectives, all the reactions across the broad spectrum of media and political positions avoided the main issue at stake, the crux of Butler’s criticism: that the CSD is complicit in racist ideologies. 9 Instead, Butler’s repudiation of the prize was rendered in terms upon which she had hardly touched – on the basis, for example, that the CSD is a commercial enterprise (see, for example, Feddersen, 2010). This discursive strategy of erasure – an eclipse producing an ellipsis – not only discarded her criticism of racism but also dismissed the migrant anti-racist groups and contexts that Butler explicitly acknowledged as enabling her critique. Thus, the YouTube clip plays a part in a situation of intense and bustling discursive regulation enacted by the CSD officials on stage and by further proponents across a wide range of media. What is valuable about the clip is how it reveals, through a comparison of its various contexts of representation, the regulating and normativizing acts that attempt to obscure or eclipse, to effectively cast out or ellipse, a specific and crucial aspect of Butler’s critique: against homonationalism.
Through the web archives that instantly tail the event, we attempt to reconstruct and reassemble the constellation of actors and actions that extend beyond it. The camera-phone recording of the outright ignorant pronouncements and attempts at appeasement over the PA system following Butler’s exit from the stage, together with the noises and conduct of the crowd (part of which seems to be angrily shouting towards the CSD representatives onstage, while others appear to have no idea of what is going on, simply cheering and yelling for pleasure), add up to an odd soundscape. However, this soundscape helps greatly to explain the conflict, agony and controversy around the latent and manifest racist complicities negotiated, negated and framed by a public event like the CSD. The visual and auditory components operate concertedly as much as against each other in demonstrating this. The perspective is decidedly partisan in its attempt to register the various, interconnected articulations of criticism, anger, shame, offence, defence, appeasement and authoritarianism that amount to a struggle over visibility, audibility and naming. Ambient, natural, mediated and amplified sounds mingle and push against the visual texture of the footage, completing and constituting the representation of contradiction, protest and exclusion, of hedonistic desire and political controversy over co-optation, normalization, regulation and violence. In other words, the clip enables us to articulate an eclipse and retrieve its effects – an ellipsis, a blank space; an erasure produced by normative closures, made detectable and recoverable in the audio-visual textures of interventions such as those made by ‘andrenarchy’ and its ensuing contestations.