Judith Butler’s “Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly” is a work of political philosophy that extends and develops Butler’s longstanding theoretical concerns with performativity, precarity, and embodied political action. Published in 2015, the book emerged from Butler’s engagement with contemporary social movements, particularly the Occupy movements, the Arab Spring uprisings, and various protests against austerity measures and state violence. The work represents Butler’s attempt to theorize the political significance of bodies gathering together in public space, asking fundamental questions about what it means for people to assemble, what such assembly accomplishes, and how bodily presence itself can constitute a form of political speech and claim-making.
The Central Argument: Assembly as Performative Politics
The book’s core argument revolves around understanding political assembly not merely as a backdrop for political speech or action, but as itself a crucial form of performative political expression. Butler argues that when bodies gather together in public space—whether in streets, squares, or other locations—they are not simply creating a context for making political demands through conventional speech acts. Rather, the assembly itself performs a political claim. The very act of gathering enacts the principle that “we, the people” are here, that we persist, that we have not been successfully excluded or rendered invisible, and that we exercise a plural and performative right to appear.
This performative dimension of assembly operates on multiple levels. First, assembly demonstrates that those who gather continue to exist and persist despite conditions of precarity, economic abandonment, or political marginalization that might render them dispensable or invisible. Second, the act of gathering in public space contests the allocation of public and private space, challenging who is permitted to appear where and under what conditions. Third, assembly enacts a form of popular sovereignty and political agency that does not depend on pre-existing institutional recognition—the people assembled do not wait for permission to appear as political actors but rather constitute themselves as such through the act of gathering.
Butler emphasizes that this understanding of assembly requires rethinking the relationship between action and speech in political theory. Classical political philosophy, particularly in the Arendt tradition, has often privileged speech as the distinctively political mode of action, with bodily presence serving merely as a precondition for speech. Butler argues instead that bodily assembly is itself a form of political expression that can make claims even in the absence of conventional speech, or that can give speech its political force precisely through the embodied, plural character of its enunciation.
Precarity and Interdependence
A crucial dimension of Butler’s argument concerns the relationship between assembly and precarity. Butler has developed the concept of precarity in earlier work to describe the politically induced condition of vulnerability and exposure to injury, dispossession, and abandonment that characterizes contemporary life under neoliberalism and its attendant forms of governance. In this book, Butler argues that assembly becomes politically significant precisely in relation to conditions of precarity.
Those who assemble often do so because they are subject to conditions that render their lives precarious—whether through unemployment, underemployment, lack of access to healthcare, housing insecurity, exposure to police violence, or other forms of systematic vulnerability. The act of assembly responds to precarity by enacting interdependence and mutual support. When people gather, they create infrastructures of care and solidarity, however temporary or fragile. They demonstrate that survival and resistance depend on collective action and mutual recognition rather than individual resilience.
Butler argues that this enactment of interdependence challenges dominant neoliberal ideologies that emphasize individual responsibility and self-sufficiency. Assembly makes visible the fundamental human condition of interdependence—the fact that human life is always sustained through relationships of dependency and support, and that vulnerability is a shared condition rather than an individual failure. By gathering together, people both acknowledge their shared precarity and contest the political and economic arrangements that produce and distribute precarity unequally.
The relationship between precarity and assembly also raises questions about the material conditions and bodily needs that enable or constrain political action. Butler insists that political theory must attend to the embodied character of political actors—the fact that bodies require food, shelter, rest, and protection from the elements and from violence. Assembly often involves creating temporary infrastructures to meet these needs: encampments provide shelter, food is shared, medical care is organized, and systems of mutual protection are established. These material practices are not merely logistical necessities but are themselves part of the political meaning of assembly, demonstrating alternative forms of social organization based on mutual care rather than market exchange or state provision.
The Right to Appear and the Politics of Space
Butler develops an extended analysis of what she calls “the right to appear”—a concept that captures how assembly enacts a claim to political existence and recognition. This right is not a pre-existing legal entitlement but rather something that is performatively claimed and enacted through the act of appearing in public space. When marginalized or excluded populations gather visibly in public, they assert their existence as political subjects who matter and who have claims to make, regardless of whether existing legal or political frameworks recognize such claims.
The right to appear is intimately connected to questions of space and its political organization. Butler examines how public space is regulated, surveilled, and allocated in ways that determine who is permitted to appear where and under what conditions. Certain populations are systematically excluded from public visibility—whether through laws against loitering or assembly, through urban design that eliminates gathering spaces, through policing practices that target particular bodies, or through economic arrangements that privatize formerly public spaces.
Assembly contests these spatial arrangements by occupying space in ways that challenge its designated uses and its implicit exclusions. When protesters occupy a square, set up an encampment, or march through streets, they are not simply using space as a neutral container for political action. They are challenging the political organization of space itself, asserting that public space belongs to the public and that those who have been excluded have a right to appear and to remain.
Butler emphasizes that this spatial politics of assembly often involves a fundamental vulnerability. Those who gather in public space expose themselves to potential violence from police or counter-protesters, to the elements, and to various forms of precarity. Yet this vulnerability is not simply a weakness but can become a source of political meaning. The willingness to expose oneself to such vulnerability, and to do so in concert with others, enacts a form of courage and commitment. Moreover, the vulnerability of assembled bodies can make visible the violence required to maintain existing spatial and political orders—when police attack peaceful protesters, they reveal the coercive force that underlies claims to legitimate authority.
Performativity, Gender, and Embodiment
Butler’s theory of assembly builds on and extends her earlier work on performativity, particularly her influential theorization of gender performativity. In that earlier work, Butler argued that gender is not an expression of an inner essence but rather is constituted through the repeated performance of gendered acts and norms. Gender is something we do rather than something we are, and it is through the citation and repetition of gendered norms that both gender identity and the illusion of a pre-existing gender essence are produced.
In “Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly,” Butler extends this performative framework to political assembly and collective action. Just as gender is performatively constituted, so too is political agency and collective identity. The “we” that assembles is not a pre-existing collective subject that then decides to gather. Rather, the “we” is constituted through the act of assembly itself. People become a political collective through the process of gathering, acting in concert, and recognizing themselves and each other as part of a shared political project.
This performative understanding has important implications for how we think about political representation and popular sovereignty. Traditional political theory often assumes a pre-existing “people” who then authorize representatives or express their will through established political channels. Butler’s performative approach suggests instead that the people constitute themselves as such through acts of assembly and collective claim-making. Political agency is not something possessed by individuals who then aggregate into a collective, but rather emerges through the relational and performative practices of gathering and acting together.
Butler also emphasizes the embodied character of performativity in assembly. Unlike speech acts that might be understood as primarily linguistic, assembly is irreducibly bodily. It is bodies that gather, bodies that occupy space, bodies that are vulnerable to violence and exposure. This embodied dimension means that assembly always involves questions of bodily need, bodily vulnerability, and bodily difference. The bodies that assemble are diverse—differently abled, differently gendered, differently racialized, differently aged. This diversity is not incidental but is central to the political meaning of assembly, as it enacts a form of plural political agency that does not depend on homogeneity or unity.
Non-Violence, Vulnerability, and Resistance
Butler devotes significant attention to questions of violence and non-violence in political assembly. She argues for understanding non-violence not simply as a tactical choice or moral principle, but as a political practice that is intimately connected to the performative and embodied character of assembly.
Non-violent assembly enacts a particular relationship to vulnerability and interdependence. By gathering without weapons, protesters expose themselves to potential violence while refusing to replicate the violence of the state or other oppressive forces. This exposure is not passive victimhood but rather a form of active resistance that challenges the legitimacy of state violence and makes visible the coercive force required to maintain existing orders.
Butler distinguishes this understanding of non-violence from liberal notions of peaceful protest that simply comply with state regulations and remain within designated spaces and times. The non-violence she theorizes is more radical—it involves occupying space without permission, disrupting normal flows of commerce and governance, and refusing to disperse when ordered. This form of non-violence is confrontational and disruptive, even as it refuses to employ physical violence.
The practice of non-violent assembly also enacts an ethical and political commitment to preserving life and refusing the logic of disposability that characterizes contemporary forms of governance. When protesters practice non-violence, they assert that lives matter—both their own lives and the lives of those they oppose. This stands in contrast to forms of governance that treat certain populations as disposable or as legitimate targets of violence.
Butler acknowledges the complexities and debates surrounding non-violence, including questions about self-defense, property destruction, and the diversity of tactics within movements. She does not offer a simple prescription but rather seeks to theorize how non-violent assembly can be understood as a performative political practice that enacts particular values and makes particular claims about the kind of political community being imagined and enacted.
Coalition, Plurality, and the Problem of Unity
A significant portion of Butler’s argument addresses the question of how diverse groups and individuals come together in assembly without requiring homogeneity or unity. This is a crucial political and theoretical problem: how can people act together effectively while respecting and maintaining their differences?
Butler argues against models of political action that require a unified collective subject or a single shared identity. Such models, she suggests, inevitably exclude or marginalize those who do not fit the dominant identity or who have different priorities and perspectives. Instead, Butler advocates for a politics of coalition that embraces plurality and difference as sources of strength rather than obstacles to overcome.
In assembly, people gather across differences—differences of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, nationality, and political perspective. These differences do not disappear in assembly but rather are negotiated and navigated through ongoing processes of communication, conflict, and compromise. Coalition is not a state of harmonious agreement but rather an ongoing practice of working together despite and through disagreement.
Butler emphasizes that this coalitional practice requires particular forms of political work. It requires listening to and learning from those whose experiences and perspectives differ from one’s own. It requires being willing to have one’s own assumptions challenged and to modify one’s positions in response to others. It requires developing forms of solidarity that do not depend on sameness but rather on mutual recognition of shared stakes and interdependence.
The question of plurality also relates to the spatial and performative dimensions of assembly. When diverse bodies gather in the same space, their differences become visible and must be negotiated. The space of assembly becomes a space of encounter across difference, where the challenge is to create forms of collective action that do not erase or subordinate difference but rather work through and with it.
Theorizing Popular Sovereignty and Democracy
Butler’s theory of assembly has important implications for how we understand popular sovereignty and democracy. She challenges traditional liberal democratic theory, which tends to locate popular sovereignty in electoral processes and representative institutions. While not dismissing the importance of such institutions, Butler argues that they cannot be the sole or primary site of democratic politics.
Assembly enacts a form of popular sovereignty that operates outside and sometimes against established institutional channels. When people gather in streets and squares to make political demands, they are not waiting for the next election or working through official channels. They are directly exercising political agency and asserting their right to participate in determining the conditions of their collective life.
This extra-institutional form of popular sovereignty is particularly important for those who are excluded or marginalized within existing political systems—those who lack citizenship, those who are disenfranchised, those whose voices are systematically ignored within representative institutions. Assembly provides a way for such populations to assert their political existence and to make claims on the political community, regardless of their formal legal or political status.
Butler also emphasizes that this form of popular sovereignty is necessarily plural and performative rather than unitary and pre-given. There is no single “will of the people” that assembly expresses. Rather, assembly is a site where multiple perspectives and demands come together, where conflicts are negotiated, and where collective political agency is constituted through ongoing processes of gathering, deliberation, and action.
This understanding challenges both liberal democratic theory and certain radical democratic traditions. Against liberal theory, Butler insists that democracy cannot be reduced to electoral procedures and representative institutions. Against some radical traditions, she argues that popular sovereignty is not the expression of a unified revolutionary subject but rather emerges through plural, coalitional practices that embrace rather than overcome difference.
Relation to Butler’s Broader Work
“Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly” represents a significant development in Butler’s intellectual trajectory while also maintaining continuity with her earlier work. Butler first gained prominence with “Gender Trouble,” which revolutionized feminist and queer theory through its account of gender performativity. Subsequent works like “Bodies That Matter” and “Undoing Gender” further developed these themes, exploring the materiality of bodies, the constraints and possibilities of performative agency, and the politics of gender and sexual recognition.
In the early 2000s, Butler’s work took a more explicitly political turn, engaging with questions of war, violence, and precarity. “Precarious Life” and “Frames of War” examined how certain lives are recognized as grievable while others are not, and how this differential distribution of grievability relates to contemporary forms of warfare and violence. These works developed the concept of precarity that becomes central to “Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly.”
The assembly book brings together these various strands of Butler’s thought—performativity, embodiment, precarity, and political agency—in a sustained engagement with contemporary social movements and collective political action. It represents Butler’s attempt to develop a political theory adequate to the forms of protest and resistance that emerged in the 2010s, while also drawing on and extending her longstanding theoretical commitments.
The book also engages with and revises aspects of Hannah Arendt’s political theory, particularly Arendt’s account of action, speech, and the public realm. While Butler draws on Arendt’s insights about the importance of plurality and the space of appearance, she also critiques Arendt’s tendency to privilege speech over bodily presence and her insufficient attention to the material conditions that enable or constrain political action.
Significance and Reception
“Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly” has been significant for several reasons. First, it provides a theoretical framework for understanding contemporary social movements that emphasizes their embodied, spatial, and performative dimensions. At a time when movements like Occupy, the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, and various anti-austerity protests were reshaping political landscapes, Butler offered a way of theorizing what these movements were doing and what they meant.
Second, the book contributes to ongoing debates in political theory about democracy, popular sovereignty, and political agency. Butler’s performative approach challenges both liberal democratic theory and certain Marxist or radical democratic traditions, offering an alternative that emphasizes plurality, embodiment, and extra-institutional forms of political action.
Third, the work extends Butler’s influential theorization of performativity into new domains, showing how the concept can illuminate not just gender and identity but also collective political action and assembly. This has opened up new avenues for thinking about how political agency and collective identity are constituted through performative practices.
The book has also been subject to various critiques and debates. Some critics have questioned whether Butler’s emphasis on non-violence is adequate to situations of severe oppression or state violence. Others have asked whether the focus on assembly and occupation as forms of political action is sufficient, or whether it needs to be supplemented with attention to other forms of organizing and institution-building. Still others have engaged with Butler’s account of precarity, asking whether it adequately captures the specific forms of vulnerability and exploitation experienced by different populations.
Despite these debates, “Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly” has been widely recognized as an important contribution to contemporary political theory and to theorizing social movements. It demonstrates Butler’s continued relevance and influence across multiple fields, from feminist and queer theory to political philosophy to social movement studies. The book exemplifies Butler’s characteristic style of thought—rigorous, theoretically sophisticated, politically engaged, and attentive to the embodied and material dimensions of human life and political action.
