Judith Butler: While demonstrations and assemblies often do not suffice to produce radical changes, they change our perception of what “the people” is. And they affirm the fundamental freedoms that belong to bodies, in their plurality. There can be no democracy without freedom of assembly, and there can be no assembly without freedom of movement and meeting. Mobility and bodily capacities are thus presuppositions of this freedom. The public demonstrations against austerity and precarity present in the street, in the public eye, the bodies of individuals who themselves suffer from a loss of class position and a feeling of civic degradation. They thus affirm collective political action by assembling, in their own way.
[…] Sometimes the mere presence of those who are meant to stay mute in public discourse manages to break these structures. When undocumented migrants assemble, when the victims of expulsion meet, when those who suffer unemployment or drastic reductions in their pensions meet, they inscribe themselves in the imagery and discourse of the representation of what the people is, or should be. Of course they do make specific demands, but assembling is also a means of making a demand with one’s body, a corporeal demand on public space and a public demand on political authorities.
So in a sense we first of all have to “break and enter” into discourse before we can speak truth to power. We have to break the constraints on political representation in order to expose its violence and oppose its exclusions. As long as “security” continues to justify the banning and dispersion of protests, assemblies and encampments, security serves to decimate democratic rights and democracy itself. Only mobilisation on a large scale, what we might call an embodied and transnational form of courage, will succeed in defeating xenophobic nationalism and the various alibis that today threaten democracy. More here.