*2.3. Nonviolent Resistance Seen as Communicative Action*

We have already seen how Butler uses the idea of performativity to describe how subjects are constituted through the citational practices in which they partake. Applying this lens to Gandhi's *Satyagraha*, they claim that "[t]he 'soul force' that Gandhi had in mind was never fully separable from an embodied stance,<sup>17</sup> a way of living in the body and of persisting, precisely under conditions that attack the very condition of persistence" (Butler 2020, p. 201). One could thus try to flesh out what nonviolent resistance means for both Butler and Gandhi at a very concrete level: how do they see bodies act differently, i.e., in resistance to destructive norms, without availing themselves of violence? What exactly does nonviolent resistance look like concretely, and how does it communicate relationality (an existing social bond) and resistance at the same time? The first idea that the two thinkers share is that nonviolent resistance is neither passivity nor inaction; it is not submission or acquiescence or obedience; instead, it is calculated action. Indeed, when Gandhi first felt called upon to define or describe the "new principle" that had come into being through the collective Indian resistance to the Black Act in the Transvaal (passed in 1906), it was in order to distinguish it more clearly from "passive resistance" and from being viewed as "a weapon of the weak" (Gandhi 1928, p. 121). Gandhi again and again contrasts *Satyagraha* with submission or acquiescence, which results from fear and cowardice.

Secondly, Butler (2020, pp. 21–22) draws upon Gandhi to insist that nonviolence need not be divorced from rage, indignation, or aggression.18 Nonviolence may well be rooted in these types of emotions and might even be "aggressively" pursued, not too dissimilar from Albert Einstein's description of himself as a "militant pacifist". Moreover, Gandhi says it is a force or strength "that arms the votary with matchless power" (Butler 2020, p. 21). *Satyagraha* is "manly", he insists, because more courage and strength of character is required for its practice19 even than for the practice of violent resistance (CWMG 10, p. 93). Notable is that both Butler and Gandhi agree that this "soul force" must be distinguished from the kind of physical strength which aims to coerce through inflicting harm, but that on the other hand, it remains an embodied manifestation (and performance) of strength and of power. Butler (2020, p. 22) describes this physical force as follows: nonviolent resistance presents "a force against force"; it is "an ethical stylization of embodiment, replete with gestures and modes of nonaction, ways of becoming an obstacle, of using the solidity of the body and its proprioceptive object field to block or derail a further exercise of violence". The power of nonviolence crucially does not lie in its ability to induce fear in the adversary nor to harm them. The performance must thus include a reinforcement of the pre-existing social bonds that bind even resister and oppressor to one another.

At the same time, however, the performance must demonstrate steadfast resistance to, and transgression of, the violent rules and norms that structure the relationship between the two parties, thereby also insisting upon change in the name of radical equality. The *Satyagrahis* use their bodies to enter a field of violence and to simultaneously expose, block, divert and neutralise that violence. Instead of threatening harm, nonviolent resistance aims to transform relationships and the norms that structure them. This is why the body that performs resistance in a nonviolent way must also be understood as engaging in a kind of speech act whereby it communicates a rich set of meanings to a wider world, inclusive of the adversary. Butler (2020, pp. 195–96) provides the example of the "standing man" demonstration in Taksim Square, Istanbul, in 2013, where the demonstrators illuminated the ban on public assembly and free speech, by bizarrely performing it perfectly, thereby simultaneously opposing it. In this manner, nonviolent resistance always forms a key part of a larger conversation and takes it further; it is dialectic at heart. Butler's key notion of performativity helps to draw out more clearly some of the implications of the power that Gandhi also discerns in the implementation of *Satyagraha*.

Both Butler and Gandhi understand that oppressive systems can only be inaugurated and sustained through the continued cooperation of the oppressed. We have already discussed how Butler sees performativity as the reiterative and citational practices of action, speech and bodily comportment that materialise norms in the world. Gandhi holds a similar view couched in an alternative vocabulary, when he says for example, "Whether there is or there is not any law in force, the Government [of Transvaal] cannot exercise control over us without our cooperation" (Gandhi 1928, p. 172). He thus, based on the traditional Indian practice of *dhurna*, urges the oppressed to withdraw their support and cooperation from the rulers: 'We cease to play the ruled' (CWMG 10, p. 114). In addition, in *Satyagraha in South Africa*, Gandhi (1928, p. 144) quotes Kachhalia's speech, again emphasising the inherent limitations of (normative) violence:

We know how powerful the Transvaal Government is. *But it cannot do anything more than* enact such a law [Black Act]. It will cast us into prison, confiscate our property, deport us or hang us. All this we will bear cheerfully, but we cannot simply put up with this law (emphasis added).

We know that with its beginnings in the Transvaal, *Satyagraha* entailed that participants first refused to obtain passes that would regulate their movement, courting arrest. After promises made by the government, they registered voluntarily for passes and in a third movement publicly gathered to burn their passes as a way of registering their disobedience to the oppressive norms contained in the Black Act (Gandhi 1928, p. 144). Even though the actions might seem to be contradictory, Gandhi explains in his narrative how they are part of an ongoing conversation between the Indian population and the Transvaal Government and how the different actions all correspond with essentially the same message of nonviolent noncooperation with the hate-filled spirit of the Black Act. Different expressions of that noncooperation were needed at different points in the dialogue. Typically, we become docile and obedient bodies out of fear of the hidden (or not so hidden) violence (used for punishing, shaming, ostracizing, or otherwise injuring or killing) that undergirds the

dominant norms. This is why it is imperative that in their public actions, *Satyagrahis* first and foremost display and communicate the absence of fear—this courage in an important way starts to shift relations of domination. This is because, as Gandhi understood, if one forces another to do something against their will, only through violence or threat of violence, then "what is granted under [such] fear, can be retained only so long as the fear lasts" (CWMG 10, p. 78). In contrast, nonviolent resistance aims to change the will of the opponent itself.

Both thinkers therefore conceive of nonviolent resistance as meaningful, communicative action, which plays out in a kind of dialectic that enters into conversation with violent oppression, even as it disrupts and deflates (indicates the inherent limits of) the latter's logic. Neither underestimates the salience of structural or normative violence that denies subject status to some groups of people. One could perhaps say that nonviolent resistance triggers the latent self-defence mechanisms of instituted norms and their guardians and thereby reveals the physical violence that lies coiled just underneath the surface of structural violence, parading as peace. Often, the open performance of disobedience reveals, through activating, the hidden yet pervasive violence required for the sustenance of the *status quo*. Another way of putting this point might be to say that nonviolent resistance brings privately suffered dehumanisation into the public domain and insists upon its political, thus shared, social, importance. It has a way of transforming or translating often indirect, mutely and passively borne violation, humiliation and suffering in the form of debilitating injustices, into a public spectacle of overt violence.<sup>20</sup> It thereby makes systemic, invisible injuries visible for a wider audience and calls everyone as a witness. As Butler (2020, p. 22) describes the bodily act of nonviolent resistance, it "exposes the body to police power" and it "enters the field of violence" and "exercises an adamant and embodied form of political agency". It thus seems that when bodies "speak differently" in this specific sense, they do the work of translating injustice into complaint, victims into political agents, the everyday into spectacle, and nonsubjects into subjects. They do this performatively, by bringing to light violence and suffering that had been designed to be invisible or at least normalised socially.

Thousands of "everyday", dispersed humiliations or degradations suffered by a whole community get telescoped, gathered together, in the body of the one who publicly performs the disobedience, who "gives his or her body" in this way, in an attempt to force the system to change. In order to shed light simultaneously on the dignity of the oppressed and on the indignity of their treatment by the system, these nonviolent resisters must often face the direct violence that their disobedient or queering actions tend to unleash. Gandhi understood very well that this type of action is likely to bring harm upon the resister, and he sees "the potency of suffering" as lying at the heart of *Satyagraha*. Because *Satyagraha* aims for "the conquest of the adversary" purely through persuasion, it cannot be reconciled with causing him harm. By suffering in one's own person (Gandhi 1928, p. 124), one performatively works to "transform both oneself and social reality", writes Butler (2020, p. 22).

With the help of Butler's lens of performativity, one can therefore see Gandhi's *Satyagraha* also as a kind of public performance furthering an ongoing conversation. It was important for him that *Satyagraha* must manifest as open, collective transgression enacted in public. He made sure the authorities were informed about their plans and about what exactly they meant to convey by their actions.<sup>21</sup> Truth and transparency were an indispensable part of the movement, and this is because a type of communication, a dialectic, characterises the actions of the *Satyagrahis*. When Gandhi looks back upon the confrontation between the Indian and White communities in Durban in 1896, he is convinced that "our firm stance proved [to the Europeans] that the Indians, poor as they were, were no cowards, and ... were prepared to fight for their self-respect and for their country regardless of loss" (Gandhi 1928, p. 67). Foreshadowing the notion of *Satyagraha* as dialectic and resonating with Butler, Gandhi shows that the event not only communicated their resistance to their opponents but also to themselves: "The [Indian] community [in Natal] had an opportunity of measuring their own strength and their self-confidence increased in

consequence. I had a most valuable experience, and whenever I think of that day, I feel that God was preparing me for the practice of *Satyagraha*" (Gandhi 1928, p. 67). Recall that the first task of the nonviolent resister is to perform fearlessness, because fear of normative violence is what upholds any unjust system. By performing the self-respect, dignity and courage that manifest in active disobedience, the *Satyagrahi* galvanise love force within their own ranks and community and trigger the imagination of the oppressed as much as the oppressors and bystanders and of the larger world. Another organisation of the world starts to appear as possible and even desirable: it is the social imaginary that is activated.

These descriptions show clearly how the bodily performance of steadfast yet nonviolent resistance by the Indians in Natal and Transvaal acted at once communicatively (as relational) and transformatively (as resistance). It led to a re-evaluation of themselves and their relations with others in all of the affected parties, and even beyond them, in the larger national and international worlds. For the *Satyagrahis* to bodily perform their disobedience is to demonstrate that they have lost the fear that is needed to keep them docile, and in this manner, the "spell" that normative violence holds over a community is broken. When its rules are broken in such an open and collective way, everybody realises that the norms are dependent upon large-scale buy-in, upon a tacit social contract, and accompanying bodily habits, and that the social contract may have to be renegotiated.22 This is the way in which *Satyagraha* as bodily performance has the power to change social realities. As a form of communication, it respects the social bonds that hold together the human world, but as a form of contestation, it insists that the way those bonds are organised is violent and destructive to some and therefore has to be, and can be, changed. By staging a different performance, highlighting the violent clash between the dignity of the lives of the oppressed and the destructive structures of oppression, it urges and supports the community as a whole to imagine a different social world, more respectful of everybody's becoming-subject. By forcing into the open a hidden clash or contradiction, *Satyagraha* tries to force some form of metaphoric resolution beyond the status quo: how should the social world and its embedded norms be transformed in order for the dignity of the oppressed to be accommodated within them? It should by now be clear why for both Butler and Gandhi, nonviolence cannot simply be one strategy amongst others (including violent ones)—just like violence, it cannot be reduced to *techne¯* but is properly understood as a *praxis*, a kind of virtue. This topic is taken further in the fourth and final theme.

#### *2.4. Nonviolence Viewed as a Way of Life*

It is noteworthy that a crucial moment at the start of the *Satyagraha* movement in Transvaal was the taking of an oath by the Indian community, on 11 September 1906. At the meeting that was held to decide how to respond to the proposed Asiatic Law Amendment Ordinance (also called the Black Act), Seth Haji Habib proposed they should all "solemnly" declare "in the name of God that [they] would never submit to that law" (Gandhi 1928, p. 112). Gandhi, who was "taken aback" by Habib's proposal, because of its solemnity, then spoke at length to the meeting about the individual responsibility that goes with swearing such an oath. He stated, "Everyone must only search his own heart, and if the inner voice assures him that he has the requisite strength to carry him through, then only should he pledge himself and then only will his pledge bear fruit" (Gandhi 1928, p. 115). He laid before the meeting the likely harm they will suffer if they stayed on this path of nonsubmission, including imprisonment, insult, hunger, hard labour, flogging, fines, loss of property, illness, deportation, and even death. Recall that Gandhi understood suffering to be integral to the practice of *Satyagraha*. He also understood that what was required for its success was a steadfastness in the face of suffering, great personal strength. When it came to *Satyagraha*, there was no hiding in the mob: "Although we are going to take the pledge in a body, no one should imagine that default on the part of one or many can absolve the rest from their obligation" (Gandhi 1928, pp. 116–17). This understanding of the nonviolent resister as an internally disciplined individual, who holds firmly onto both love and truth at the same time, runs through all of Gandhi's writings.

When the Indians first read the Ordinance and saw that even women might be required to produce passes, one of them responded with anger, saying that if his wife were to be confronted in this manner, "[he] would shoot [the officer] on that spot and take the consequences". To this, Gandhi responded that the Ordinance is indeed "designed to strike at the very root of [Indian] existence in South Africa", but at the same time, "[i]t will not do to be hasty, impatient or angry. That cannot save us from this onslaught. But God will come to our help, if we calmly think out and carry out in time measures of resistance, presenting a united front and bearing the hardship, which such resistance brings in its train" (Gandhi 1928, p. 110). Clearly, then, he recognises the legitimacy of their anger, but implies that to act purely out of emotion renders the action ineffectual. Acting from emotions of hurt weakens us; instead, the *Satyagrahis* must act out of strength, and thus the cultivation of inner strength and especially courage is a constant task of nonviolent resisters. This is why we do not fully agree with Butler (2020, p. 21) when they enlist Gandhi to argue that nonviolence might be "an expression of rage, indignation, and aggression" and "does not necessarily emerge from a ... calm part of the soul". While resistance surely emerges from an emotional part of the soul, a place of righteous indignation, for Gandhi, *Satyagraha* as a collective movement must mediate and transform those emotions from (understandable) feelings of rage, helplessness, humiliation and so on, into the kind of strength and determination that accompany calculated and strategic action. Maybe above all, anger must be transmuted into the kind of self-discipline and willingness to self-sacrifice that the movement requires.

He speaks of *Satyagraha* as a type of warfare and *Satyagrahis* as "soldiers of peace" (CWMG 69, p. 274), who have to be similarly self-disciplined as soldiers of war, even much more so. Just as nonviolent resistance does not stand alone as a mere instrument or strategy but is rooted in a complete ontology (as explained in Section (i)), its practice should ideally be rooted in nonviolence as a virtuous way of life that is cultivated over time. Gandhi proposed various practices of what might be described (following Foucault) as "care of the self", including a vegetarian diet, physical exercise, physical labour, meditation, fasting, and so on. Because *Satyagraha* is a kind of virtue ethics, we have to acknowledge that it takes time to be cultivated, and Gandhi's own struggles have moreover shown that it often takes a long time to achieve the desired effect. The struggle in Transvaal lasted eight years (from 1906 to 1914). A large part of the *Satyagrahis*' steadfastness relates to their ability to keep at the struggle in the face of setbacks, even if it lasts years.

Although Butler does not engage directly with the self-discipline and self-sacrifice that Gandhi sees as required from the *Satyagrahis*, their lengthy engagement with the constant potential for relations of interdependency to "become a scene of aggression, conflict and violence" (Butler 2020, p. 50), because the human condition of interdependency is "intolerable" at times (Butler 2020, p. 96), resonates well with Gandhi's concern described above. Butler's understanding of nonviolence as a way of life is also embedded in their ethical praxis. In fact, Butler urges us to "embed our ethical reflections within an egalitarian imaginary" because "the imaginary life turns out to be an important part of this reflection, even a condition for the practice of nonviolence" (Butler 2020, p. 77). Part of practicing these ethical reflections, which Butler (2020, p. 64) views as a "relational obligation", also include continuously subverting and resisting individualised modes of subjectivity through collective, performative action.

Further, their social ontology and deep insight into our constitutive relationality are not a romantic picture; instead, our implicatedness in one another is "lived out as an ambivalent social bond, one that constantly poses the ethical demand to negotiate aggression" (Butler 2020, p. 69). With the help of Freud and Klein, Butler tries "to think aggression as part of any social bond" and to consider the ways in which we construct rationales for "acting aggressively against an aggression that is [supposedly] coming from the outside" (Butler 2020, p. 80). These rationales (of self-defence) usually occlude our own capacity for and involvement in, violence enacted upon others. Thus, for Butler, there is no pure love force, absolutely separable from hatred, as there is for Gandhi. Instead, "hatred for the ones upon whom one is intolerably dependent is surely part of what is signified by the destructiveness that invariably surges forth in relations of love" (Butler 2020, p. 98). In fact, (western) "phantasies of sovereign self-sufficiency" are infantile remnants of this unbearable dependency, a dependency that can nevertheless never be eradicated (Butler 2020, p. 99). What we see them nevertheless share with Gandhi is the understanding that the capacity for violence exists in every one of us, not in spite, but because of our fundamental and ineradicable sociality, and that therefore, self-examination and vigilance about one's own capacity, even lust, for violence must form a constant companion to the ideal of nonviolence. Even more clearly than Gandhi, Butler sees how violence and nonviolence are intermingled, not only in the politicised nature of their respective naming, but also in the very act of resistance itself. This is why they remind us of everybody's capacity for violence, and to be mindful of "the tipping point, the site where the force of resistance can become the violent act or practice that commits a fresh injustice" (Butler 2020, p. 23). In this different emphasis, we detect a similar vigilance to Gandhi's concern about the purity of soul and steadfastness that we described as a kind of individual-focused virtue ethics in his thinking, but one might say that Butler's focus is more on the collective. They are namely concerned about the ever-present possibility that collective resistance may turn violent and become indistinguishable from the violence that it professes to oppose, thereby losing the force that is unique to a nonviolent stance.
