Magic table

From Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition [1958]:

The public realm, as the common world, gathers us together and yet prevents our falling over each other, so to speak. What makes mass society so difficult to bear is not the number of people involved, or at least not primarily, but the fact that the world between them has lost its power to gather them together, to relate and to separate them. The weirdness of this situation resembles a spiritualistic séance where a number of people gathered around a table might suddenly, through some magic trick, see the table vanish from their midst, so that two persons sitting opposite each other were no longer separated but also would be entirely unrelated to each other by anything tangible. (pp 52-3)

Cognition, on the other hand, belongs to all, and not only to intellectual or artistic work processes; like fabrication itself, it is a process with a beginning and end, whose usefulness can be tested, and which, if it produces no results, has failed, like a carpenter’s workmanship has failed when he fabricates a two-legged table. (p 171)

At first I thought that these two examples, both employing a table, as she often does, were in contradiction with one another. Now it seems to me rather that while action is not work, work is none the less required to erect the space of action (the disappearing table). It would be worth going back to On Revolution to see if she discusses the actual practical activity of ‘making revolution’ as work. Work, then, could found new politics in a way that labor never could. Makes sense.

Aristotle's Politics

The ancients are seductive. Although Aristotle is very clearly the product of significant cultural accumulation, there remains a sense, a feeling, that in order to understand this, I don’t really have to go further back. Aristotle is not to be explained, but rather explains; of course an illusion, but a sort of pleasant one. I have begun, perhaps wrongly, with The Politics. I’m using the translation by Jonathan Barnes, in the Cambridge edition edited by Stephen Everson.

The physicality of Aristotle’s analysis is striking. There are definitions and distinctions, but the project itself never gets very far away from the practical being-together of human beings. One reason I turned, finally, to Aristotle is Hannah Arendt. Yet her notion of ‘the political’ is infinitely more abstracted than his. I saw recently an article, I think in JHI, pointing out that the polis is always implicit behind Arendt’s discussion of the political. Reading On Revolution, I myself wanted to ask about place in the sense of geography. If I had more energy, I would dig back through the book, and submit this notion of the place of politics to a critique with the resources suggested in David Harvey’s Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom. It becomes a problem for Arendt’s whole way of thinking that politics only really happens when humans are face to face, talking with one another. This seems totally inadequate to the modern world, a sort of deep utopianism. In a sort of reverse move, Claude Lefort’s formalism (for lack of a better word), seems equally utopian, so abstracted from the essential problem of getting human beings to do one thing rather than another, as to be, well, philosophically rather than politically useful.

Aristotle, on the other hand, is never far not only from humans facing one another, but from their bodies themselves. The Politics begins with a consideration of the practical necessities for the sustenance of human life. It ends with what seems today to be an over-long consideration on the proper place of music in education—what effect do certain rhythmic structures and music modes have on the development of body and mind? Aristotle often compares the state to a body, in order to argue that proper proportion is crucial for excellence. Yet more physical, bodily, evidence runs throughout the work. For instance in book V, which treats revolutions and is, interesting, the most empirical chapter, we get the following example, “In the conspiracy against Archelaus, Decamnichus stimulated the fury of the assassins and led the attack; he was enraged because Archelaus had delivered him to Euripides to be scourges; for the poet had been irritated at some remark made by Decamnichus on the foulness of his breath” (1311b.30). The passions of individuals are always an important consideration in politics—sex, therefore, is never far away. Also in book V, in the Machiavellian second half (on preventing revolutions), he advises, “neither he [the tyrant] nor any of his associates should ever assault the young of either sex who are his subjects, and the women of his family should observe a like self-control towards other women; the insolence of women has ruined many tyrannies” (1314b.25). I don’t remember Machiavelli talking particularly about sex; I do remember, however, that he says it is better to kill a man’s relative than strip him of his property, because he will forget the former faster than the latter. I doubt Aristotle—despite several times repeating the parable about cutting down the tallest corn-stalks—could bring himself to think such a thing.

Related to this, and one of the moments of estrangement for me in the text, were all the discussions of the common meal. It was evidently a widespread custom in the polis for all the citizens to eat meals in common, not always in one place, since their numbers were too great, but in common eating-rooms. Aristotle at several points discusses the best way of organizing this custom, its benefits, the problems that can arise. More than that, though, the example and metaphor of the public feast is nearly as important for him as is that of the body. This is to say that the physiognomy of the feast is well enough known that it can serve as evidence for other things. For instance, “Now any member of the assembly, taken separately, is certainly inferior to the wise man. But the state is made up of many individuals. And as a feast to which all the guests contribute I better than a banquet furnished by a single man, so a multitude is a better judge of many things than an individual” (1286a.28). Perhaps the importance of the meal in common should not surprise me (there is, after all, the Symposium, or Banquet). Still, it is a reminder of a very different mental world underneath what sometimes seems like quite a familiar one. Although, the familiarity and strangeness of this, “children should have something to do, and the rattle of Archytas, which people give to their children in order to amuse them and prevent them from breaking anything in the house, was a capital invention, for a young thing cannot be quiet” (1340b.26), with loud children everyone is familiar, but the idea that you might be able to cite the name of the person who invented the rattle…well, here is just another reason for the seductive (which is to say, to be resisted) feeling that Aristotle is in some profound way an origin, a beginning.

I have read elsewhere references to, discussions of, Aristotle’s treatment of the economy in The Politics. More interesting was what I can only call a sociology of political forms that emerges from its pages. For instance,

The first governments were kingships, probably for this reason because of old, when cities were small, men of eminent excellence were few. Further, they were made kings because they were benefactors, and benefits can only be bestowed by good men. But when many persons equal in merit arose, no longer enduring the pre-eminence of one, they desired to have a commonwealth, and set up a constitution. The ruling class soon deteriorated and enriched themselves out of the public treasury; riches became the path to honour, and so oligarchies naturally grew up. These passes into tyrannies and tyrannies into democracies; for love of gain in the ruling classes was always tending to diminish their number, and so to strengthen the masses who in the end set upon their masters and established democracies. Since cities have increased in size, no other form of government appears to be any longer even easy to establish. (1286b.10-20)

This is not so very far away from certain pages in, say, Durkheim’s Division du travail social, on the extent and density of society. Although I’m wary of the term ‘middle-class’ as it appears in this translation, we must surely also see a sort of political sociology behind such statements as, “a government which is composed of the middle class more nearly approximates to democracy than to oligarchy, and is the safest of the imperfect forms of government” (1302a.14). It is hard not to find some kind of Tocquevillian ‘proleptic shadow’ in an analysis of the present such as this, “Royalties do not now come into existence; where such forms of government arise, they are rather monarchies or tyrannies. For the rule of a king is over voluntary subjects, and his is supreme in all important matters; but in our own day men are more and more upon an equality, and no one is so immeasurably superior to others as to represent adequately the greatness and dignity of the office” (1313a.4-9). Aristotle comes to the conclusion that “the best material of democracy is an agricultural population” (1318b.10) through a consideration of the economic necessities of agriculture, and the (few) possibilities it leaves open for political activity. The examples of this sort of thing could be multiplied.

The point for me is that this sort of analysis—linking political forms to quite concrete social realities—no longer seems to make any sense. Why is that? An obvious answer would be that Aristotle’s world was the polis, most of which contained similar institutions, and most of which were small enough that their leadership could not be too separate from their day-to-day life. A person such as Aristotle might well come to know a great deal about all parts of life in such a society. Today, this is simply no longer possible. Even a reasonably small polity is massively more diverse than a Greek polis. But of course this line of reasoning, although it abolishes itself at the end, is just the same as Aristotle’s—it basis political theory on practical reality, although it begins by claiming that the practical reality is unknowable. I think the key here really is the space of politics. For Aristotle and Arendt, it was contained, limited, knowable. Today it is endlessly multiple. The question would be, is it fractal, and therefore in a sense knowable? or is it chaotic and basically available only in fragments? The Marxist answer is fractal, the ‘liberal’ one chaotic. That’s one way of thinking about things, at any rate.

Although I’ve said almost nothing about the ‘political theory’ elaborated in The Politics (what is democracy? What is a polity? What is the nature of a good constitution?), I will finish by remarking on the adjectival nature of most of Aristotle’s analyses. (I am tempted to grammatically summarize Greek philosophy: Heraclitus, verbs; Plato, nouns; Aristotle, adjectives—have I read that somewhere before?) Although Aristotle does, of course, describe ‘an oligarchy’ or ‘a tyranny,’ the bulk of his theoretical elaboration, it seems to me, goes into establishing the ends, therefore the natures, of these forms and then pointing to certain institutions as democratic, oligarchical, and so forth. I had often in the past heard of Aristotle’s ‘teleological’ method, but I had not realized that this might be what it meant. How rigorously must this be distinguished from a Weberian notion of ‘ideal types’? It bears some thinking about.

Arendt and Truth and Politics

Because of Martin Jay’s The Virtues of Mendacity, I sat down today to read Hannah Arendt’s “Truth and Politics.” I am very glad that I did, but I do wish that I'd started with the Arendt. Much of what Jay was doing, and why he was interested in certain questions and not others, would have then been clearer.

“Truth and Politics” is, as Jay points out, very much Arendt struggling with herself, raising issues that she is unable to contain in any definitive way. One point that Arendt touches, and that one might ask Jay to have dealt with in more detail, is, “the question of numbers” (pg 235 – I’m using the text as reprinted in Between Past and Future). This is salient in terms of the distinction between fact and opinion. Arendt contrasts the repressive capacities of the totalitarian states with the troubling tendencies of free countries,

to the extent to which unwelcome factual truths are tolerated in free countries they are often, consciously or unconsciously, transformed into opinions—as though the fact of Germany’s support of Hitler or of France’s collapse before the German armies in 1940 or of Vatican policies during the Second World War were not a matter of historical record by a matter of opinion. Since such factual truths concern issues of immediate political relevance, there is more at stake here than the perhaps inevitable tension between two ways of life within the framework of a common and commonly recognized reality. What is at stake here is this common and factual reality itself, and this is indeed a political problem of the first order. (236-7)

From this it follows that, “factual truth...is always related to other people: it concerns events and circumstance in which many are involved...it exists only to the extent that it is spoken about...It is political by nature” (238). These are the kind of sensible observations about which one doesn’t quite know what to do. Certainly not, it seems to me, follow Enrique Dussel’s advice and institute a ministry of truth(-telling in the media). Most interesting in this connection is the historical distance that separates Arendt and Dussel, which we might shorthand as the difference between the experience of totalitarianism and authoritarianism.

As I say, Arendt raises but never really grapples with the special problem that collectivity poses for truth. She of course points to the well attested fact that reasonable ethical principles for an individual cannot be followed by a polity—the relevant one here being Socrates’ ‘it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong.’ If it seems clear than a politician, whose task is to act in the best interests of a polity, cannot abide by this principle, it is less clear to me that the polity itself is obliged to disregard it. Indeed, it seems to me that the eminently political problem of the establishment of collective norms and ideals is crucial to the question of truth—although perhaps it is a rational rather than a factual truth—and is not something Arendt approaches. It seems that for her, collective norms are simply aggregates of individual ones: “that all men are created equal is not self-evident nor can it be proved. We hold this opinion because freedom is possible only among equals, and we believe that the joys and gratifications of free company are to be preferred to the doubtful pleasures of holding domination” (247). Ethical ideals may become collective, for Arendt, only by undergoing a process of what we might call de-philosophication. This might be the gap between the philosophical and the literary. Ethical principles exist, but ethics is learned through example. Examples need not be physical, although they often are—they can be literary (Young Werther!)

For Arendt, truth-telling is not an action. It is purely reflective. In this it is like political thought, which is representative, and therefore not active. Lying, on the other hand, is an action. Ordinary language philosophy would no doubt have something to say here: truth is simply constative, while a lie is inherently performative—it assumes a whole range of things not assumed by the simple recitation of truth. That’s the story. I’m not sure that truth-telling as a specific kind of action is really any less freighted down with implied context than lying. (Doesn’t Doing Things with Words begin with the admission that, in fact, all language is performative? Or is this a willful miss-remembering on my part?) According to Arendt, though, truth-telling only takes on political meaning in specific circumstances: “Only where a community has embarked upon organized lying on principle, and not only with respect to particulars, can truthfulness as such...become a political factor of the first order” (251). This is the image of totalitarianism. It points to my major question about this essay, one that is very often asked and less often satisfactorily answered: do not contemporary forms of information distribution radical change the situation?

An important foil, in Jay’s book, to the Arendtian perspective, is the ‘aesthetic’ mode of political thought represented in this case by Pierre Rosanvallon and Jacques Rancière. I think it may be significant, in this comparison, that Arendt’s metaphorical construction of truth and the political are tactile, physical, whereas the ‘aesthetic’ (the quotation marks are there because the usage is a little out of the ordinary) is dominated by metaphors of visuality or of discourse.

I should defend my claims. Arendt describes facts and events early in the essay as “the very texture of the political realm” (231). Later, discussing the possibility of ‘the big lie,’ Arendt again uses the word ‘texture,’ this time comparing a lie to “a hole in the fabric of factuality” (253). The wonderful last lines of the essay are, “conceptually, we may call truth what we cannot change; metaphorically, it is the ground on which we stand and the sky that stretches above us” (264). Truth, that is, is that which can be touched and felt; we use it to cloth the nakedness of our existential condition, and when we engage in political struggle, it is the rocky ground on which we plant our feet.

Rancière’s perspective on the political is quite different. His ‘aesthetics’ is the partition of the visible, the making-visible of new subjects, the making-audible of new voices—in order to disagree, we must already consider one another speaking beings. This is a radically different way of conceiving politics. Rancière is not, I think, very interested in the issue of ‘truth.’ Rosanvallon, who is different from Rancière in many ways, is also not very interested in truth as such, but he does use little factual truths to build up a notion of politics as a discursively constructed field of possibilities that is not unlike the one that Rancière approaches from, shall we say, the direction of rational truth.

What both of these notions of politics share is a sort of placeless-ness, an abstract ‘public’ that is perhaps more substantial for Arendt than for, say, Rancière, but is none the less singular for both. I wonder if the real challenge that we face today in the apparent unification and massification of communication is not really the abolition of this abstract and singular place of the public. This is an argument I heard made long ago by Cass Sunstein, and although I know he has been much abused, his lecture made an impression on me, and seems to me still an important point. There is no public sphere, because there is no one place into which everyone must enter in order to hold an opinion. Mass democracy does not just mean, as Arendt and so many of her generation worried, that techniques of psychological control by a central government would become powerful means of political self-deception. Today, to the degree that the production and partition of ‘factual knowledge’ is autonomous and radically democratic, the process of generating and evaluating such knowledge becomes political to an absolute degree. In fact, today in a way never before possible, it seems to me that our political allegiances are broadly identical with the screens we use to evaluate incoming fact-claims. Certainly identity and political position are bound up in surprising (dare I say, early-modern) ways, it seems to me that this is closely related to the situation that one’s politics always precedes one’s ‘decision to believe.’

The simple fact that the above description of ‘our’ condition seems plausible to me at all is why I find that the final pages of Arendt’s essay sound as though she is attempting to convince herself of what she knows not to be true. Speaking of the independent judiciary and, above all, the academy, Arendt says, “it can hardly be denied that, at least in constitutionally rules countries, the political realm has recognized, even in the event of conflict, that it has a stake in the existence of men and institutions over which it has no power” (261). It is gratifying, although not perhaps practically convincing except in an ideal sense, to read Arendt say that, although the technical achievements of the academic technical sciences are enormous, “the historical sciences and the humanities, which are supposed to find out, stand guard over, and interpret factual truth and human documents, are politically of greater relevance” (261).

Rather than saying that Arendt is attempting to convince herself of what is clearly not the case, perhaps it is better to say that she has here driven her own line of thinking to its contradictory conclusion. The academic ward of truth has a crucial political function, but is not itself political. In what must be a pointed dig at Wittgenstein, Arendt says, “reality is different from, and more than, the totality of facts and events, which, anyhow, is unascertainable” (261). Facts and events (interesting distinction, given that the invasion of Belgium by German in 1914, surely an event, is one of her examples of fact) make up the texture of the political. The historian—and the novelist’s—task is “the transformation of the given raw material of sheer happenstance,” that is, to fuse these facts and events into narratives. Arendt glosses this herself as, perhaps, with Aristotle, the cathartic function of the poet—to cleanse men of emotions so that they may act, but also, “the political function of the storyteller...is to teach acceptance of things as they are” (262)—this acceptance is preparatory to judgment and then action; but does that make any sense? Can politics really require that one stops and judges objectively? Can that be what Arendt means? That the answer is at least a little complicated is suggested by who she identifies as the origin of objectivity: Homer. In the equal portrayal of Greek and Trojan—“Homeric impartiality” (263)—,she says, is the origin of the objective historical account. If, to push her a little, it is really Homer who made the earth and the sky, then perhaps there still exists in the power of fictionality some residual spark of the great poet’s capacity to manufacture the conditions of action?