CHAPTER

SEVEN

ARENDT: SOCIALITY and COMMUNITY ON ITS

OWN TERMS

INTRODUCTION

Up to this point the topic of community and sociality has

been approached through the work of other academics, aspects

of their work having been described and located both within

the current debate, and within the tradition typifying

social science ‘investigation’ of community.

It is now time for me to lay my cards on the table and to

suggest a non-mechanistic approach capable of understanding

sociality and community without reference to any pre-empting

idealism or abstraction.

The first step involves a radical reading of the work of

Hannah Arendt, in particular, her most important work, ‘The

Human Condition’ (1958 hereafter referred to as THC). It is

argued that this work offers the theoretical perspective for

precisely the anti-mechanistic, anti-metaphysical re-

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ordering of community and sociality which is the aim of this

book.

Arendt’s work is central to this search firstly because she

provides a de-constructive reading of metaphysical and

mechanistic constructions of the social and secondly,

because her work suggests a way beyond the inherently

oppositional post-modernist accounts.

Arendt achieves this because her attacks upon the Cartesian

and mechanistic viewpoint are not confined simply to the

essential subjecti, but specifically address the dis-

empowering of the social and social being-ness. Furthermore,

through various methods which we will briefly examine, she

explicitly positions her work outside traditional

philosophical confines, refusing a simple reversal of values

and constructing instead an inter-relational picture of the

social, where the safeguarding of an open and communal

social space is the highest priorityii.

A close reading of THC reveals the following –

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A skeletal outline of a multi faceted - that

is a constructive as well as an oppositional

- approach to a de-centred human-being-ness.

The basis for an anti-metaphysical and anti-

mechanistic approach to sociality in both

its micro and macro manifestations.

And this is what – in the interest of the

overriding aim - this chapter intends to

illustrate.

Mainstream Readings

The reading of Arendt this chapter will develop goes against

the grain of the vast majority of work on Arendt. In part

this is because I concentrate upon one book, but primarily

because I view THC as a coherent anti-metaphysical project.

It is my claim that much of what passes for work on Arendt

misunderstands her overall purpose, in part because of the

strangeness of her work and in part because many

commentators ‘pick and choose’ from a partial appreciation

of her work (Villa D. 1996 p4). As a result academics

complain her work is difficult (Villa D. op cit p4), that

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she is obtuse and contradictory. This has led some

commentators to suggest quite strongly that the problem lies

with Arendt herself (Kaleb G. 2000 p134; Zaretsky Eli 1997

p207; Pitkin H.F. 1998 p11). As such while many commentators

pay lip service to her influence especially in relation to

her famous discussions on power, the sum of this lip service

rarely amounts to more than a few lines (Torfing J. op cit.

p166 is typical of this). All of which I would like to

demonstrate; unfortunately there are word limits. What needs

to be said however is that contrary to many critics

(Benhabib S. 1996; Pitkin H.F.1998; Moruzzi Norma Clare

2000; Zaretsky Eli op cit) I feel there is a cohesive

wholeness and foundation to THC as a work and that the

structure and ordering of THC perfectly mirror Arendt's

thematic purpose.

As such this chapter intends to engage with Arendtian

concerns principally connected with her approach to

community and sociality. The sum of these topics supports

the claim that Arendt provides the fundamental cornerstone

for a de-centred modelling of sociality and community.

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Arendt’s Radicality: her anti-metaphysical and anti-mechanistic project

“I have clearly joined the ranks of those who......have

been attempting to dismantle metaphysics and philosophy with

all its categories as we have known them from their

beginnings in Greece until today” (quoted in Villa 1996 op

cit p163). In these terms Arendt announces the focus of her

lifetime project. Given ‘THC’ was published in 1958 this aim

linked her specifically, to the then still highly suspect

work of isolated thinkers, such as Nietzsche and Heidegger.

She is thus contained within a European, not an American

philosophical tradition.

So what can be said generally about Arendt's anti-

metaphysical and anti-mechanistic project? Initially, it can

be noted that in contrast to Foucault who attacks

metaphysics by studying its effects and revealing their

political nature and origins, Arendt attacks it by

overturning the Platonic privileging of thought over action

(Arendt 1958 p222), the privileging of the “cosmic and the

universal, as distinguished from the terrestrial and the

“natural” (ibid various p268 also p263-265).

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Indeed, THC can be read as an historical investigation of

the means through which action is conceptually transformed

into a mode of making, how it is theoretically established

within the western tradition as secondary to thought and

furthermore, how this privileging of idealism and

abstractions (ibid p263/4, p267, p272), has separated human

beings from their own social being-ness.

THC describes how the terminology of political theory and

political thought (ibid 229) sustains the primacy allocated

to thought over actioniii through a regime of articulation

built upon mechanistic and metaphysical privileging. It also

allows Arendt to make clear that these regimes of

articulation are not simply sustained by the separation of

noun and verb, object and acting, but also by the privileging of

abstraction over being-in-the world as a means of explaining the world (ibid

p321). This abstraction - which Arendt terms process (ibid

p296/297) sustains the privileging of idealism and thought

over worldly and social existence (ibid p318, p276),

constructs and maintains the ‘Cartesian community’ and

regulates and ‘disappears’ the social.

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This is what Arendt means when she says that she is

interested in the relation of the men and the earth, not Man

and life (ibid p318). For Man, and indeed life, in this

latter sense, are abstractions.

Against the primacy of abstraction, the privileging of

essences and process, Arendt asserts the inter-relational

plural being-ness of the world (ibid p321). Essences and

universalism are creations of the mind (ibid p268ff), they

are the manifestations of the elevation of labouring which

creates a ‘dimmed downed world” (Villa. op cit p138); they

dull and remove the world from us, just as they remove us

i There is also an issue about generic designation in relation to theappropriate term for human beings both in the singular and the general.Because the term ‘subject’ is implicated in the Althusserian, postAlthusserian, structuralist and post structuralist turn to discourse,and because I desire to make a break with the focus and form of thatmode of analysis, human beings will be referred to in their singularform as ‘person’, and in their generality simply as ‘human beings’.Arendt herself uses the words ‘man’ and ‘men’ as a generic term forhuman beings, but in 2002 this cannot be sustained. I will continue touse the word men where Arendt contrasts it to Man because this has aspecific sense within Arendt's text, a sense I wish to maintain. Thenon-essentialised Arendtian person is referred to as the ‘who’; and onceagain for similar reasons, this is a usage I will abide by.ii Clearly it is beyond the scope of this book’s purpose to investigate fully either the vast scope of Arendt’s work or to examine in any depth the entire gamut of the philosophical underpinnings of her anti-metaphysical project. Villa (1994) and Studdert (2003 thesis unpublished) provide more detail regarding this aspect.iii I will discuss the implications of formal and theoreticalimplications Arendt’s choice of the vita activa in the next majorsection.

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from the world (Arendt op cit p321). They are the single

truth of the household that denies the plurality of ‘truths’

and the possibility of agreement and co-operation (ibid

p45), they are the notion of fabrication which constructs

and values everything entirely from an instrumental

perspective and which concurrently, elevates the maker and

the final product above the actual lived experience and act

of making. It is the Platonic philosophical tradition which

by constructing, action as secondary to thought has reduced

action to an unproblematic, instrumental making facility

(Villa op cit p109), a transcendental ideal beyond a realm

of human affairs (Arendt 1958 op cit p292, Villa Dana. 1996

op cit p116).

By her choice of the vita activa, activities in the world,

activities open to all humans as a condition of their being-

ness, Arendt asserts the primacy of being-ness - the ‘who we

are’ (Arendt H. 1958 p10) over the metaphysical idealised

explanations of ‘What we are” (ibid). For this reason Arendt

refuses the comfort of any abstraction, be it psychologism

(see her attack on urges ibid p321 and subjectivism ibid

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p284), philosophy (ibid p292) or indeed any form of

metaphysics (ibid p262/3); and she has does this because

nothing entitles us to believe that man has a nature, an

essence (ibid p10) or a psychology, and because all of these

idealisms (“products of thought”) are reductive of worldly

experience to thought. All of which explains her opposition

to the primacy of cognitivism, rationality, and Cartesian

doubt (ibid p267/297 and p318 for examples of this though it

permeates everything she wrote). Of course Arendt does not

oppose thought per se, simply the manner in which Platonic

and Cartesian thought pre-constructs the social for us: a

construct which, as it were, refuses human being-ness and

the action that creates being-ness, access to it. Against

this Arendt continually asserts the primacy of lived

experience, the individuality of experience, the social

being of existence and crucially the inter-relationality of

experience (ibid p321 where the two sit side by side).

But this represents only the oppositional half of her

project. By posing the question ‘who we are’ rather ‘what we

are’, Arendt reverses the traditional western philosophical

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standard which inscribes thought with prescriptive power

over action (Villa 1996 op cit p160) and overturns the

traditional de-coupling of thought from action. Yet this

reversal represents more than a simple theoretical re-

privileging. Quite the contrary for even action is contained

and expressed through other interlinked conditions such as

labour, work and plurality. It is the inter-relational

perspectives within which her picture of the social is

expressed, rather than simply her stress on action alone,

which enunciates Arendt's work as truly radical.

So this reading disputes the many critics who describe

Arendt as simply privileging action in a direct substitution

with thought (D’Entreves, Maurizio Passerin. 1994), indeed,

that such a reading simply recreates the primacy of

abstraction that Arendt is seeking to overturn. I believe a

more accurate reading of THC would describe it not as a

privileging of action, but rather as describing a theory of

inter-relationality. Arendt's world is a social world, a

common relational world where human beings are a conditioned

and conditioning force, where action, freedom and identity

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are all limited and conditioned by the world and by their

own location within a web of relationships; where if action

endows the world with meaning, it does so as an outcome of

the fundamental conditionality of all human being-ness.

Where whatever truth is established, is established by the

presence of others people, who confirm the reality of

ourselves to ourselves (Arendt 1958 op cit p95; Hill Melvyn

(ed) p293/294).

Thus the intellectual philosophical game where one

abstraction replaces another and absolute truth is

maintained is precisely what Arendt's project avoids. So as

Villa observes (Villa Dana. (ed) 2000 p8), her criticism is

aimed not at work as such, or the social as such, or

labouring or even thought, but rather at the

universalisation of a particular set of attitudes and the

manner in which the Western tradition’s elevation of thought

has blurred the distinctions and articulations within the

vita activa (Arendt op cit p17). The result is that far from

simply re-constructing a new piece of solid ground through

which the frailty and relativity of human existence can be

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concealed anew, Arendt actually performs quite the contrary

act, and elevates the frailty, relativity, open ended,

relational, and uncontrollable nature of being-ness, against

the entire Platonic philosophical tradition and the

abstraction it champions. A step which is vital to maintain

the dual status of her anti-metaphysical and anti

mechanistic project, for of course in ‘privileging’

interrelationality she brings to light precisely those

linkages and hybrids which Latour claims mechanistic theory

suppresses (Latour op cit p 37).

Explicit within Arendt's interrelation project is a

concurrent ontological shift from the privatized self

towards a self constituted by disclosure, action, and co-

operation and this shift is also creative of a new form of

power, a form not simply based on conflictual imperatives. A

move which bypasses the simply mono-causal linkage of the

subject/state axis examined in chapter five in which the

individual and the state are established as the exclusive

mode of political being.

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Having established the terms of her project, what is needed

now is to detail its creative and particular manifestation

within specific categories. Naturally it is the argument

that these categories are reflective of, and contained

within, an over riding set of principles, and that as such

the distinction and separation performed is entirely

procedural.

A good place to commence is with a simple description of the

structure of THC, beginning with the prologue.

The Prologue opens with a discussion of reactions to the

contemporaneous launching of the sputnik, immediately

locating the work as concerned with the modern world. In

discussing this event Arendt singles out what she terms a

general feeling of relief that man can finally remove his

earthly chains. Crucially however, Arendt does not say that

the material reality produces these reactions, but rather

that this ‘new condition of being’ is an outcome of man’s

anticipation (Arendt 1958 op cit p2). Thus the sputnik and

the possibilities it presents to leave the being-ness of

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life on earth, are manifestations of a culture whose deepest

desire is to escape the human condition (ibid).

Arendt immediately presents us therefore with a world where

experience has been reduced to two mutually exclusive modes

of being - subjective experience and the objective

constructions of modern science. Each of these modes is

based upon different versions of speech and politics; what

is more they are mutually exclusive. Arendt locates both

these themes within an historical perspective (ibid p2) and

establishes them as ‘political questions’ (ibid p3). By

doing so she announces that her criticism does not derive

from any simple foundational nostalgia. Nor does she have

the answer. This immediate disavowal of an Archimedean

point, of any claim to ultimate truth, also very subtly

enunciates her perspective as inherently anti-mechanistic,

as does the statement that whatever the answer to these

problems, it can only be decided by the ‘agreement of many’,

not by either theoretical considerations, or on the basis of

individual opinion (ibid p5). Thus the work is immediately

announced as an inter-relational project, positioned in the

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social and opposed to the primacy of abstraction and

individual subjectivism as the means for explaining the

social. In this context what follows immediately is an

explicit statement positioning her work as concerned with

contemporaneous being-in-the-world.

“what I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing

more than to think what we are doing. “What we are doing”

is indeed the central theme of this book” (ibid p5). A

statement which almost irresistibly recalls Foucault’s

famous and often quoted statement of his purpose. While I do

not intend to examine the differences and similarities

between the two, I would suggest a comparison is instructive

and revealing.

Arendt then spells out the proposed topics of the book.

These topics - “a discussion of labour, work and action -

(the Vita activa)” (ibid) - have been chosen so Arendt makes

clear, because they “are within the range of every human

being” (ibid). What is important is the explicit positioning

of the work as an investigation into, and contained by, the

lived actuality of all human being-nessiv.

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INTER-RELATIONALITY

It is these three conflated steps - her location of her

project outside philosophical boundaries, her stress upon

plurality and the social as over and above the individual

and finally, her stress on the inter-relationality of the

social that distinguish THC from apparently similar work of

Nietzsche, Heidegger and Foucault. This is a giant step and

it allows Arendt not only to escape the trap of extreme

subjectivism and aestheticism which imprisons Nietzsche for

instance (Villa 1996 op cit p103ff) but also allows her

project to be more than simply oppositional.

That this is intentional becomes clear in a passage pregnant

with more than simple philosophical generalities.

‘Academic philosophy... has .. been dominated by the never

ending reversals of idealism and materialism, of

transcendentalism and immanentism, of realism and

nominalism, of hedonism and asceticism and so on. What

matters here is the reversibility of all these systems, that

iv That is why thought as a particular category is specifically excludedfrom the list of topics that THC will focus upon (ibid p5); it is not afundamental condition of human life.

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they can be “turned “upside down” or “downside up” without

requiring for such reversals either historical events or

changes in the structural elements involved. ....... ..It is

still the same tradition the same intellectual game with

paired antitheses that rules, to an extent, the famous

modern reversals of spiritual hierarchies, such as Marx’s

turning Hegelian dialectic upside down, or Nietzsche’s

revaluation of the sensual and natural as against the

supernatural” (Arendt 1958 p293 also p17 where she says the

same thing). Furthermore, in a passage at the end of the

chapter she explicitly states that her

“use of the term vita activa presupposes that the concerns

underlying all its activities ........ is neither superior

or inferior to the central concerns of the Vita

contemplativa” (ibid p17). This is vital, for if Arendt was

to postulate one as superior to the other, then a simple

reversal would be the limits of what she does perform. And

the fact that she does not do perform a simple reversal is

why I claim Arendt’s project is superior to Nietzsche’s, and

indeed any other anti-metaphysical project.

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Therefore, while Arendt may oppose the Cartesian individual

(ibid p279), her target is much wider than one philosophical

totem. Thus what I seek to establish, is the means by which

Arendt’s interrelationality establishes the basis for an

empowered reading of community, in clear contradistinction

to the currently articulated regimes of knowledge utilised

by the human sciences.

Following the introduction, the first two chapters map the

terms of our human being-ness, the human condition and the

activities of the vita activa which personify human being-ness

within the conditioning frame of the world. Thus the vita

activa is discussed initially in relation to life (ibid p7-

11), then in relation to philosophy (ibid p12-17), and

finally in relation to space (ibid chapter two). The dual

effect of this examination is firstly to locate the trinity

of labour work and action as simultaneously conjoined

activities and conditions of existence, and secondly, to

elevate doing and being as the fulcrum of Arendt's

investigation.

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Examining the first point in more detail, it can be seen

that the first chapter is devoted to establishing the

components of the vita activa both as activities and as

conditions of being. Within this examination, labour, work

and action while they are distinguished, are not presented

as separate, ideal categories, rather they are

painstakingly, mutually, interlinked. They are shown as

having what I will term, a passive and an active form. The

passive form situates them as present prior to birth, we are

born into them and agreement is demanded as a condition of

our being-ness. The active meaning is the meaning created by

some degree of human input.

Therefore, while initially, Arendt links each of them with a

condition of life (ibid p7), a closer reading of the

relevant section (ibid p7-11) shows that they are positioned

and established inter-relationally. So the activities -

labour, work and action are, alongside natality, mortality,

worldliness, life itself and plurality, all implicated as

conditions of life in the conditioned existence of men (ibid

p9). They are present at birth. For instance all men have to

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provide in some form or other, through some means or other,

for their biological needs. Men must either labour

themselves or have someone else do it (ibid p176). Labour as

the satisfaction of biological needs, is thus, just as much

a condition of human being-ness, as natality, plurality, or

mortality. Labour is not simply, or exclusively, a

materially enunciated set of activities, rather labour is

whatever is done predominantly to satisfy biological needs

(ibid 84). Thus, at one level, any activity could

potentially qualify as labouring if it is undertaken

principally to serve these ends. If this were not the case

then Arendt's classification of modernity as a society where

principles of labouring have permeated every activity would

simply have no meaning. Similarly, while Arendt initially

states that action belongs to the human condition of

plurality (ibid p175) she also says that ‘action has the

closest connection with the human condition of natality

(ibid p9). Natality is, it should be noted, also present in

politics (ibid) which has as its specific condition,

plurality (ibid p7). Furthermore, action would be

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unnecessary without plurality (ibid p8). While “action is

inherent in all human activities” (ibid p9) it is also a

condition of being which man cannot escape (ibid p208). This

configuration of course postulates action as a contained

within an inter-relational web, and thus impervious to

mechanistic essentialisms, polarities and demarcations such

as conscious/unconscious, structure/agency and so forth. In

this vein Arendt does not say that plurality is the

exclusive condition of politics, but rather that it is the

specific condition, just as the difference between labour

and work is based on a contextual judgment, not an essential

definition.

Thus chapter one establishes the vita activa as implicated

within all practices - discursive and material - and all

activities, subjective and objective. Chapter one also

locates the vita activa in the history of western philosophy.

Thus the insertion of the vita activa into the Platonic

philosophical framework, establishes it as a means by which

western philosophy, and the human sciences as regimes of

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articulation for the organisation of sociality and social

power, can be examined in a historically specific manner.

The second chapter introduces the spatial placement of

labour, work and action through its introduction of public

and private space, and by the mapping of this social space,

as the manifestation and spatialisation of these three

fundamental practices.

Here for the first time the twin focus of Arendt's work

becomes clear. For labour, work and action exist within the

world of human being-ness, they are conditions of human

being-ness, which condition, and are conditioned in turn by

the world; that is the stress in her account falls upon the

linkages which are described as mutually constituting. They

are activities and actions through which systems of thought

become concrete but which also exist as particular action(s)

prior to systems of thought. In turn as action and as speech

as action, the vita activa illuminates the conditions under

which the social human being-ness is theoretically

enunciated. Each of these human conditions has a conjoint

positioning within thought, practice and space, which is in

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relation both to the world of men and to the world of nature

(ibid p23). What is more this positioning is subjective and

objective, as well as historically specific. This historical

placement is crucial in establishing the non-essential

status of Arendt’s examination.

The next three chapters deal individually with each of the

three components of Arendt’s focus, charting the historical

movement and positioning of each practice within the

contemporaneous social and within the philosophical

hierarchy. Finally, the last chapter serves to answer

Arendt's initial question, by placing the vita activa within a

contemporary perspective.

THE ELEMENTS OF ARENDT’S APPROACH TO THE SOCIAL

Introduction

I have argued throughout that Arendt attempts to unite what

she herself describes as the “curious discrepancy between

the world orientated, “objective” language we speak and the

man orientated, subjective theories we use in our attempts

at understanding” (ibid p94).

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Having, hopefully established the general terms for Arendt’s

project in THC, what is needed now is to turn to the

possibilities she offers for a theoretically elaborated,

post-mechanistic articulation of community.

Arendt is clearly trying to think of being-ness in a non-

sovereign, worldly way (Villa Dana. 1996 op cit p118) and as

such she wants, not simply to construct an oppositional

logic, but to reconfigure the social world (Curtis K.1999

p16). The task of this section then, is to draw from

Arendt’s work, the elements useful for a theoretically

empowered articulation of the social. I would argue that

there are three elements within the THC crucial to any

attempt to establish a post-mechanistic model of the social.

These three elements are

Plurality

Certain elements from her description of

action

Most importantly the entire notion of the

web of relations.

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The sum total of these three elements, when viewed

interrelationally, is creative of a de-centred, social

being-ness termed by Arendt, the ‘who’. These three

elements and the ‘who’ which they create, are the centre

of this section. I will in due course provide some

explanation for various delimitations and omissions;

however it is not my intention to fully treat every part

of the rich fabric that is THC. I have divided the three

elements into two categories for the purpose of

explanation. The first of these is

The activities of being

The first activity crucial to an empowered sociality is the

fundamental human condition that Arendt refers to as

plurality: “plurality” claims Arendt “is the law of the

earth” (Arendt 1958 op cit p19). Indeed more than any other

element, it is Arendt's embrace of plurality which undercuts

the entire Platonic philosophical tradition (for a good

discussion of this in relation to Heidegger see Benhabib S.

1996 p104-107).

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Plurality in common with each condition had two conjoined

modes - passive and active. The passive mode establishes

plurality as a condition of human life and the active mode,

relates to plurality as it is contained within the active

inter-relationality of human lived-nessv. Moreover, inherent

within these twofold meanings are the dual qualities of

equality and distinction (Arendt 1958 op cit p175). In the

first sense plurality exists “because men not Man inhabit

the earth” (ibid p7) and because as human beings we are

always both the same and unique (ibid p8). It is ‘passive’

because it is a condition of being a human being, enacted

and operative at the moment of our natality. As a ‘passive’

condition it does of course still exist inter-relationally,

but this inter-relationality is something which the infant

has played no part in shaping; it is not an active force,

rather it simply is. It is a condition of the world and as

such is related to ‘work’ as the construction of objects

that endure within the world and which provides both an

objective location for our subjectivity and an enduring

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aspect that renders the world as something over and above

any single human existence. In these terms it is something

we ‘know’ without knowing it: it is there by virtue of the

simple presence of others.

In the second sense, plurality needs to be understood

inter-relationally, not as a simple condition of our birth,

but as a reality of our human being-ness. The first meaning

offers plurality as ‘given’, the second speaks of our

“responsiveness (Curtis K. op cit p25)”, our inter-

relational engagement with it. In the second sense what is

at stake, is the status of plurality, not its existence. What

Arendt is claiming here, is that plurality as an active

condition, needs to be accepted, nurtured, validated and

most importantly recognised. However in this regard there is

an option and if the choice is not to recognise it, then

lives will shape differently, the social will become ‘dimmed

down’; however plurality itself will not disappear, rather

it will simply become potential ignored, potential

concealed.

v By human lived-ness I mean the act and existence of living.

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Arendt occasionally implies this second, ‘active’ sense of

plurality when she speaks about multiple perspectives. Thus

when speaking of the public world she explicitly links

perspectives to plurality:

“the simultaneous presence of innumerable perspectives and

aspects in which the common world presents itself and for

which no common measurement or denominator has been devised.

For though the common world is the common meeting ground of

all, those who are present have different locations in it,

and the location of one can no more coincide with the

location of another than can the location of two objects”

(ibid p57) For the common world to exist therefore,

plurality must be acknowledged actively, a simple statement

but one with vast ramifications.

Later in the same passage, she states that this common

world is destroyed by the “destruction of the many aspects

in which it presents itself to human plurality” (ibid p58).

Interestingly, Arendt does not explicitly provide a

definition of this second meaning of plurality, rather she

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locates it relationally - as inherent within action (ibid

p7), as necessary for politics (ibid p7-8) as implicated in

forgiveness and promising, faculties dependent on

“plurality, on the presence and acting of others” (ibid

p237), in relation to otherness (ibid p176) as the basic

sine qua non for the space of appearance (ibid p220). On one

occasion, plurality is defined in opposition to

“sovereignty, the ideal of uncompromising self sufficiency

and mastership is contradictory to the very conditions of

plurality” (ibid p234 my italics).

The common thread in these descriptions is that plurality

functions both as a condition and as a conditioning activity

Thus, when plurality is not recognised and validated, when

it becomes disguised, the common world is lost. Existence

becomes exclusively subjective, isolated, mono-tonal and

thin, precisely because there is no common world in which we

can see ourselves or be recognised. At which point we have

become a mass.

‘If the sameness of the object can no longer be discerned,

no common nature of man, least of all the unnatural

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conformism of mass society, can prevent the destruction of

the common world, which is usually preceded by the

destruction of the many aspects in which it presents itself

to human plurality (ibid p58)”. Such a situation Arendt

says, is typical of tyranny or mass society, and in a

passage that prefigures Foucault - and which is absolutely

commensurate with our contemporary neo-liberal world of

sovereign instrumentality and ‘all lifestyle no life’ - she

notes the common world has come to an end when it is “seen

only under one aspect and is permitted to present itself in

only one perspective” (ibid p58).

So in summary, plurality functions both as a condition and a

conditioning element in human being-ness: as a condition of

life plurality represents the infinite variety of locational

perspectives ‘given’ to, and occupied by every being and

objects within our inherited common world. As a condition,

its status and its validity function to establish the

ontological basis of our human being-ness. The implication

of this is that plurality can be ‘lost’ or it can be

acknowledged. Crucially for plurality to be the basis for

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the highest form of our human being-ness it must be lived

openly. Thus plurality is not a concept but an integral part

of our being-ness dependent for its ‘visibility’ on human

activity. The recognition of plurality allows - in contrast

to Habermas and his ideal social space (Calhoune Craig. 1997

p232)vi - for the social to be permanently ‘open’: ‘open’

moreover to both the creation of new identities and the play

of perspectives which construct the “who’ as an inter-

relational and social being. Thus everywhere we look, our

identity is a worldly identity, subject to the prerogative

of the world and to the recognition of plurality. As such

our freedom and our identity can never be an abstract ideal

vi In contrast, without a concrete recognition of plurality, Habermas isforced to turn to the state and its inherently fragmenting, andmechanistic model of idealism to guarantee the same thing; a guaranteethat the history of the twentieth century state can only convince uswill never be given or honoured. What Calhoune also stresses in hisaccount (1997 p232) is the manner in which Habermas’ notion of thepublic space is so much more restricted, unitary, bounded, instrumentaland liberal than Arendt’s. Calhoune shows Habermas’ public space relieson transcending difference rather than recognising inter-relationships(Calhoune C. op cit p248). Moreover because identity is for Habermasformed outside public space, public disclosure is denied (ibid p246).The effect of this is to fundamentally constrain the possibilities ofaction, identity and plurality as democratic ingredients, and toconstrain the necessary porous nature of the public space. As was shownin the discussion of Cartesian community such an approach fundamentallyconstrains community because it constructs it as a servant of someabstraction, some outside force.

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but is always conditional, constrained, but most crucially,

always created. We not only need other people to provide our

‘reality’ by their presence, we also - as we shall see -

need the objects of the world to objectify our subjectivity

(Arendt 1958 op cit p137). As such the simple primacy

afforded by Arendt to plurality, utterly abolishes the

isolated humanist subject.

Action

“Action is the space where I appear to others as others

appear to me, where men exist not merely like other

inanimate things but make their appearance explicit (ibid

p198/199)”. Some quotes small though they are, can

encapsulate an entire work. Many of Arendt’s themes are

contained in this quote, some have been suggested

previously. My description of Arendtian action however,

focuses upon the inter-relationality of action, the duality

of meanings surrounding the term and the paradoxes that

arise as a condition of this inter-relationality. It

allocates primacy and interest to a certain form of action

over that generally valued by liberal critics of Arendt, a

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valuing which from the perspective of community, is less

useful than the mode of action I intend to stress.

The importance of action is noted in Arendt’s claim that

action is “the exclusive prerogative of man”, “the single

quality which cannot be imagined outside the society of men”

(ibid p22). In fact Arendt asserts the uniqueness of action

as the means by which man becomes distinctly human (ibid

p176). Yet the first paradox is that something so central to

human being-ness is also the most conditioned, most inter-

relational, most constrained of Arendt’s nominated

activities (ibid p178). Arendt insists that for political

action (her ‘highest’ form of action) to exist, it must

contain as its fundamental conditions - in no particular

order-: the shiny brightness of glory (ibid p180), a

revelatory quality (ibid), non-violence (ibid p179), speech

(ibid), disclosure of the ‘who’ (ibid p180), plurality (ibid

p175), “the web of acts and words of other men”(ibid p188),

initiative (ibid p177), no specific motive (ibid p179/206),

and finally, that it take place in a visible, public space

(ibid p180). In all a rare flower and not without the odd

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problem as shall be shown, yet for all of that, action is

crucial, “for trusting in action and speech as a mode of

being, establishes the reality of one’s self, one’s own

identity and the reality of the world (ibid p208). As such

people must act; they have no choice in the matter (ibid

p8). It is impossible to resist acting for human being-ness

demands that people actualize their being and this can only

be done in action (ibid p208). Something that, given the

conditional nature of action outlined above, would one

assumes, be rather difficult.

So this is the second paradox. For how is action in the form

outlined, both the most fragile (ibid p196) of all human

activities, and the most crucial? Indeed - given its

constrained condition, we might wonder how can it exist at

all? Fortunately there are three meanings of action within

THC, yet the third paradox is that Arendt devotes the bulk

of the book to only one - the most fragile and most futile

(ibid p195) and from the perspective of community the most

problematic. What it is important is to understand at this

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juncture, is that unlike the other conditions, the condition

of action has not two, but three meanings.

Firstly, in company with all other activities and conditions

(ibid p7-9) it is a simple passive condition established at

birth, forever linked to the capacity of beginning that

natality embodies (ibid p177). Secondly, as an actualising

activity, it is creative as we shall see, of man’s unique

identity, human relationships and the bridging of the

objective and subjective worlds (ibid p196). This is the

wider meaning of action; the action which is present to some

degree in all activity (ibid p9), where “the smallest act in

the most limited circumstances bears the same boundlessness

because one deed and sometimes one word, suffices to change

every constellation (ibid p190)”. However there is another

meaning, a much more limited meaning, though conversely for

Arendt, a much more potent one. In this third meaning,

action creates a specific public space, and enunciates a

true politics (ibid p179) and furthermore, this political

action is instituted historically in the polis, the French

and American revolutions, as well as certain Twentieth

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century instances of direct democracy. It is this final form

of action that Arendt enunciates as the highest form of

action (ibid p205) and which, in its fullest manifestation,

is surrounded by the plethora of conditions outlined

earlier. And that is the problem. For given that, in its

fullest glory, it is the product of rare moments of history,

one wonders how useful it can be for an attempt to construct

an approach to everyday human being-ness? Indeed, given the

rare appearance of genuine political action, at least as

Arendt tells it, it is fair to ask why fabrication and work

are so demeaned, after all opportunities for genuine action-

historically speaking - appear rather light on the ground.

Yet this cannot be true either, for the possibility to

create political action is always there as potential (ibid

p199).

To arrive at an answer to these questions, and to demarcate

clearly the manner in which the second meaning of action can

serve both a model of Arendtian action, and function within

an empowered and everyday sociality, this section intends to

examine action exclusively in its ‘active’ modes; an

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examination which hopefully will allow an answer to this

issue to emerge. In due course it shall also be seen that

part of the answer is contained in the notion of the web of

relations.

Thus action as an activity “is never possible in isolation,

to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act”

(ibid p188). Action for Arendt is worldly, it precedes being

and thought. Thus action restores the social relationship

because it generates relationships across boundaries (ibid

p189), it is the common world. Thought does not initiate

action, action is not a product of will or motive, nor does

it come from any form of individualised psychological model

(Arendt H.1961 p155); action, unlike motives and aims which

are always typical (Arendt op cit 1958 p206), is unique.

This is precisely what accounts for its miraculous and

revelatory quality. For Arendt freedom is not found in the

choice to act, or in the idea that precedes action, but only

in the action itself (Arendt H. 1961 op cit p153). Action

exists therefore as an end in itself, not for instrumental

purpose or for a higher truth or the good of man (Villa

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Dana. 1996 op cit p52) and as such action is the opposite of

the sameness and isolation that characterises labour and the

dimmed down world of instrumental reason (ibid p210).

Finally, action is intrinsically linked to speech; indeed

for Arendt they are almost conflated terms (Arendt 1958 op

cit p176). What is clear however is that by speech she does

not mean discourse, nor does she mean a situation where

discursive modes are privileged over action, rather speech

for Arendt is ‘speaking’. In this sense it is clear that

speech must accompany action, because action needs to be

communication to be social (ibid p178), and most importantly

because, given that action is revelatory of identity within

the social, this identity can only be agreed through

speaking (ibid). Given that Arendt thinks that a person in

isolation is not a person (ibid 176/180) it is also clear

that a person talking to themselves is also not a person:

speech for Arendt is action: it personifies action.

Certainly when she describes the relationship between them

(ibid), she does so in terms which stress their inter-

relationality as conjoined terms, and also in conjunction

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with other conditions as evoked and conjoined within the

matrix that action creates (ibid p178).

Therefore action is the most inter-relational of all the

conditions and activities, and unlike labour which submerges

our identity (ibid), action reveals our particular qualities

as human beings (ibid p176). Yet, and this is the fourth

paradox, action is also the most fragile of human activities

(ibid p198). For action is the only means of revealing our

being and yet, not only is this revealed identity uncertain

(ibid p182), it always carries with it a dual status that

constructs us both as doer and sufferer (ibid p189). That is

one reason why action requires plurality and trust, just as

much as it is creative of sharing and trust (for an example

of this see (ibid p189) where in words obviously aimed at

Nietzsche she speaks of the brilliant man who fails to

enlist help).

So some form of equal inter-personal relationships is vital

for the enunciation of action, and every form of action

establishes some form of relationship. While action has two

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parts and needs an initiator (ibid p189), it never remains

under their control, it is unfinalizable and unknowable,

inherently open ended, requiring the presence of others as a

condition of its existence (ibid). This is why Arendt

equates action with freedom, for human beings are free as

long as they act and not before or after (Hansen P. 1993

p54).

Yet it is a constrained freedom, a conditioned freedom, and

it is conditioned precisely because both freedom and action

are worldly matters, not inner, subjective or lonely

pursuits, they must take place in a constrained social

arena.

Another paradox, for not only does action require the

presence of others, it also creates a space for others

(Arendt 1958 op cit p198). And it does so as a condition of

its actualisation, a space moreover, where equal

relationships can come into being. Yet the great paradox is

that action is also conditioned “ridden with many

frustrations” (ibid p182) the first and most important of

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which is the congenital unpredictability of action (ibid

p244).

This is why, for Arendt, the highest form of action is

politics, for the political is the conscious recognition of

the nature of action, as a condition of being. Freedom is

not something conferred upon human beings; it is something

that needs to be created within the conditioned nature of

their existence in the world.

Clearly then, Arendt’s notion of action is an overturning of

the epistemological division of thought and action. It is a

re-assertion of the human as an inter-relational social being.

This is why I have stressed the paradoxes within Arendtian

action because inter-relationality creates paradox in a

manner that essentialist ‘truth’ and the idealist

formulations of metaphysics and mechanistic theory never

can. However I have concentrated here upon a general

description of action as an activity. If Arendt is to

assist the project of establishing a de-centred model of

community and sociality, action itself must be located in

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some realm other than the narrowly political realm

highlighted by Arendt.

THE LOCATION OF BEING

Web of relationsvii

Having delineated the general defining conditions of action

I now want to discuss the two areas for its enactment.

In the previous section I said action embodied a space, a

space creative of relationships. The most recognisable

Arendtian space is the political; metaphorically represented

by the polis. However, just as Arendt’s has two ‘active’

meanings for action - a wider one and a narrow political one

vii In the process of examining Arendt’s use of the term ‘web’, there is a slightly tangential issue to address regarding other social science usage of the metaphor of a web. Principal among these is the work of Richard Rorty, who describes the subject as a “tissue of contingent relations, a web that stretches backward and forward through past and future times” (Rorty 1989 p41). Rosenthal questions the lack of creativeagency within Rorty’s web (Rosenthal. op cit), while Featherstone (1995 p45) argues that, while Rorty endorses a de-centred approach, he fails to explain questions of linkage or what key terms mean. Indeed, one could argue that Rorty’s aversion to detailed explanation of the web is what allows him to both escape liberalism and the rational subject, while retaining the capacity to make such normative statements as “the selves created by modern liberal society are better that the selves earlier societies created” (Rorty R. op cit p63). In any case, while, aswe have seen, he is not alone in this privileging of abstraction and theaxis of subject and state, Rorty’s particular lack of detail makes his work little more than a normative discursive tissue. Certainly without more details, what he provides is of little use in developing an approach to an empowered sociality.

229

- she also presents two equivalent spaces for each of these

active meanings. It is the wider of these, the web of

relations, which is the focus here, because it alone

establishes the means by which an empowered version of the

social can be articulated on an everyday basis.

Arendt defines the ‘web of relations’ as “the in-between

(ibid p182)” by which she means the space that “exists where

ever men live together (ibid p184)”. This space is

“concerned with the matter of the world of things in which

men move, which physically lies between them and out of

which arise their specific worldly interests” (ibid p182).

In short, this world is the common world (p52), and unlike

the narrow political space of the polis, the web of

relations as the common world, contains everyone and every

interest (p 50). It is the world of absolute plurality -

acknowledged and unacknowledged - the world where the

subjective and the objective intersect. Arendt’s description

is sufficient here:

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“These interests constitute,...., something..... which lies

between people and therefore can relate and bind them

together. Most action and speech is concerned with this in-

between, which varies with each group of people, so that the

words and deeds are about some worldly objective reality in

addition to being a disclosure of the acting and speaking

agent. Since this disclosure of the subject is an integral

part of all, even the most ‘objective’ intercourse, the

physical worldly in-between along with its interests is

overlaid and..... overgrown with an altogether different in-

between which consists of deed and words and owes its origin

exclusively to men’s acting and speaking directly to one

another. This second, subjective in-between is not tangible,

since there are no tangible objects into which it could

solidify; the process of acting and speaking can leave

behind no such results and end products. But for all its

intangibility, this in-between is no less real than the

world of things we visibly have in common. We call this

reality the “web” of human relationships, indicating by the

metaphor its somewhat intangible quality” (ibid p182/183)

231

There are several key issues I want to stress about this

“intangible web”. Firstly, because this is the space where

persons disclose themselves as subjects even when they are

speaking of other worldly matters (ibid), their disclosure

is both as complete as any that take place within the

political space (p50-52). Additionally, and precisely

because this disclosure unites the subjective and the

objective within the world, it is possibly more complete

(though less dramatic) that similar disclosures within the

polis.

Secondly, the disclosive action that takes place in the

context of this web retains all the qualities of action.

What it lacks, a lack that Arendt only implies is the

‘tangibility of glory’- without the framework of the polis,

the process of acting and speaking in the common world can

leave behind no results.

Thirdly, this disclosure of the ‘who’ falls into an already

existing web of relations (ibid), that is it is conditioned

action, and a conditioned being that is created.

232

It should be noted that the “web of relations” stands as a

reductio ad absurdum to those critics of Arendt who chaff at

what they perceive as the stark and strict demarcation of

the household and the polis, even if it is a problem they

largely create for themselves. (Benhabib S 1996 op cit;

Kaleb G. 2000; D’Entreves Maurizio Passerin op cit p8;

Moruzzi Norma Clare op cit p6; Villa 1999 rebuts them 1999

p12-18, also Lefort C. 1988 specifically rebuts Benhabib op

cit p49). However given that the polis and the household are

obviously contained within the “web of relations’ and that

the capacity to construct a space of politics is clearly

available to everyone, it is not too much to presume that

the polis and the household are exemplary for Arendt, rather

than essentialised (Hansen P. op cit shares this opinion).

Indeed the use of the term “household” in relation to the

rise of economics (Arendt H. 1958 op cit p28-9) reinforces

the view that what is being referred to here is an attitude,

rather than an essentialised material or social demarcation.

Finally, there is another manifestation of Arendt's stress

upon the worldly nature of human being-ness, for the web of

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relations is more than simply human centred. Arendt

specifically includes objects as equally constitutive

elements within among the web of relations. And she does

this because as she states in the first chapter

“whatever touches or enters into a sustained relationship

with human life immediately assumes the character of a

condition of human existence (ibid p9)” and furthermore

“The things of the world have the function of stabilising

human life and their objectivity lies” (ibid p137 see also

p95). In contradiction to mechanistic philosophy, Arendt

thus has a world centred approach not a human centred

approach, and her inter-relationality is never confined

exclusively to human inter-relationality. For just as action

discloses the world to us, so action is preserved outside

the cyclical arc of birth and death by the world that work

creates - “for what humans, through action and work create,

outlives them, and has no concern for them” (Arendt H. 1961

op cit p156). And this applies to our objects just as it

does to our stories, for “the existence of a public realm

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and the world’s subsequent transformation into a community

of things that gather men together and relates them to each

other depends entirely on permanence” (Arendt H. 1958 op cit

p55). And this is how it should be for the world is over and

above, all and every individual (Arendt H 1961 op cit p156).

Objects therefore locate us and ground our human being-ness

within the web of relations, just as action does. They

objectify our subjectivity (Arendt H, 1958 op cit p37) and

stabilise our fragile existence; a dual process that bridges

the gap between the subjective and the objective and means

that no material analysis ever fully accounts for our being

(ibid p183).

The web of relations therefore is the totality of everything

that we are born into, as well as being the ‘force’

conditioning the terms within which our being can be

enunciated. So in short the “web of relations” is sociality,

the most inclusive sociality possible; the very sociality

needless to say, which this argument seeks to theoretically

elaborate.

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SPACE OF APPEARANCE

Having established the web of relations as Arendt's

inclusive, generic term for human sociality, it is now

possible to examine the second of her generic spaces - the

space of appearance- which in contrast to the web of

relations, represents a much more delineated more contained

notion. It is also clear that the space of appearance is not

something outside or separate from the web of relations,

such a mistaken theoretical abstraction would undercut

Arendt's intentions. Rather it is better to see it as a

specific re-configuration of the web of relations in the

particular instance.

For Arendt, the space of appearance is the space of human

being-ness and sociality. Unlike the web it is not something

we simply assume by birth. It is the combined product of a

momentary sociality as determining elements within the

social; in its most realised form it is the recognition of

action and plurality is a specific objectifying act of

‘being-creation’. It is created by plurality and action.

236

Thus, it is the space where particular combinations of

momentary interaction take place.

Thus the space of appearance, not the polis, is the true

generic term for the Arendtian political space, a

distinction most critics seem reluctant to acknowledge

(though Arendt herself sometimes creates this confusion

(ibid p199)). Moreover, it should also be noted, against

those intensely literal American critics, that Arendt does

not exclude women or indeed anyone else from the space of

appearance. ‘Wherever people gather together” says Arendt,

“it (the polis) is potentially there, but only potentially,

not necessarily and not forever (ibid p199)”: a statement

which indeed shows that for Arendt, the polis is nothing but

the political manifestation of the space of appearance. This

is why the space of appearance is enacted as a “specifically

human achievement (ibid p207)”. This is also clear from

Arendt’s insistence that such a space is an informal,

directly democratic space – “it predates all formal

constitutions… and even government (ibid p199)”. Indeed

Arendt is very careful to specifically state that this “true

237

space lies between people living together for this purpose,

no matter where they happen to be (ibid p198)”.

Thus the true condition for the existence and preservation

of the space of appearance is plurality as a conditional

form of action. For what upholds and preserves this space,

is the specific quality of the care brought to it and the

specific degree of human being-ness acknowledged within it.

FINALLY THE ‘WHO’

“If men wish to be free it is precisely sovereignty they

must renounce’ (Arendt H. op cit 1961 p165). Arendt could

also have said, that if people wish to be fully alive they

must renounce the illusion of sovereignty, (one could say

the virtuality of sovereignty) as that is the clear message

of her work.

As such, and given that Arendt’s clear aim is to overturn

the sovereign individual from his liberal, enlightenment

perch as the lord, master and centre of all the worlds

(Arendt 1958 op cit p254), a deal of THC is devoted to the

historical development of this fallacy of omnipotence

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designed in Arendt's view with the idea of escaping the

fragility of action, and the conditional nature of life in

the world (ibid p185/221-224/275/279. Also p75 for the

Christian contribution of the essentialised ‘good’ person

and p254 for Descartes). Moreover the creation of the

Cartesian individual erects two mutually antagonistic and

separate states - the inner truth of the individual and the

objective world accessible only to materialistic

interpretation (ibid p293). For Arendt the results of this

split have been devastating; the individual has abandoned

all sense of a common world (ibid p52/53) and sacrificed the

uniqueness and freedom for the disempowering uniformity of

psychological qualities (ibid p293 also quoted in Villa Dana

1996 op cit p52) where man encounters only himself (Arendt

1958 op cit p46/261). Nor can this loss be redeemed by

private happiness (ibid p50/112), for a life without action

or speech is “literally dead to the world” (ibid p176).

Instead of disclosive action we are now presented with a

mass of data and statistics inherently reductive of human

being-ness (ibid p322), precisely because it erects human

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being-ness as the articulation of an average plan (ibid 40-

42). In this regard Arendt's criticism is every bit as

vitriolic as Foucault’s. Moreover, there is nothing

particularly strange or radical about Arendt's criticism in

this regard (though Pitkin 1998 op cit seems to think so).

Given her stinging criticism of the unitary rational

subject,

So Arendt’s approach allows her to simply by-pass the

sterile debates between agency and structure. Thus, she does

not say that the “outside’ is simply infolded into the

subject as do some Foucauldians (Rose, N. 1999 p142). Nor

does she say that individuality is the outcome of abilities

(Giddens. op cit) or any other form of inherent capacity,

including rationality. Rather, she shifts the entire debate

from a question of “what we are” - a statement seeking a

definitive answer - to “who we are”, a relational conception

(Arendt. 1958 p10) which renders identity open, conditional

and ephemeral.

240

For Arendt our knowledge concerning what a person is, is

limited to their physical characteristics - the sound of

their voice, their physical bearing, etc. (ibid p179). As

such “what a person is”, is a question that can never be

answered (ibid p10/11).

So our identity, formed in action and speech, has a life

of its own, and its effects go far beyond anything we can

either contain or conceive. Identity is conditioned by the

nature of action and by the need to appear (ibid p176),

something which requires action and speech, which are the

form for such an appearing (ibid p208). Thus this

‘appearing’ is something “from which no human being can

refrain and still be human (ibid)”. Yet action and speech

are inherently boundless and unpredictable; action has no

author and no definitive finalisation (ibid p184): it can

never be fully known, either by the one who acts or the many

who observe. For the being-ness which acts can neither

control the action, or contain, marshal or conceal what the

action discloses (ibid p192), similarly those who observe

are also blind as to motive or consequence (ibid p179).

241

Therefore, given that every action requires plurality and

always falls into a web of relations, no single, definitive

perspective is possible concerning what it is precisely that

action or speech means or the “who” which says it. The ‘who’

is then, as it were, seen from a multitude of perspectives,

and the ‘who’, the “who are you (ibid p178)” is created

inter-relationally as a temporary conjunction of all the

perspectives, including that of the person involved.

Clearly therefore, this creation of the “who’ is something

that goes on eternally, where ever men meet each other (ibid

p182), and our being-ness can at best, be only a created

narrative, sourced from the partial and unfinalizable view

that our actions present to ourselves and to those around

us.

The ‘person’ is as Arendt says, clearly just a

provisional “collection of signs” (ibid p182) never be

closed or finalised (Kristeva J op cit p59).

It is on this basis that I have labelled Arendt's

project, inter-relational and coherent. For her privileging

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of the social and the inter-relationality which sustains the

social, is a fully enunciated working out of the

implications of this privileging. For Arendt, ‘a community,

a shared world, a common sense of appearance is the

fundamental condition for the achievement of self hood’

(Villa Dana 1999 op cit p7) and action, identity and

plurality assume their particular Arendtian meaning from the

elevation of fragility of being and sociality over and

above, the stability of thought and abstraction.

So the establishment of the ‘who’ represents the culmination

of Arendt’s entire re-figuring of the social. as such her

re-configuring also destroys the naturalisation of the

mechanistic model through which modernity has articulated

its regime of knowledge for three hundred years Truly it can

be said that Arendt appropriates Heidegger essential

ontological approach, eliminates its subjectivism, and uses

it to overturn western thought (Villa Dana. 1996 op cit

p114). Yet this ‘culmination’ occupies less than five pages

while the bulk of the book is devoted largely to the things

that obstruct the development of the ‘who” and obscure the

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true inter-relationality which underpins Arendt's version of

the social. More importantly Arendt appears to enunciate

this ‘who’ as the product of an extremely constrained space.

Thus for the purpose of developing a new approach to

community, her account of a de-centred being-ness needs to

be extended.

244

245