Social Movements, Institutions, and Rights

I have, obviously, been thinking a lot lately about how protest politics can take a form that actually moves the ball down the field, that has some impact. The following post is in response to some feedback I have gotten from a friend about a more formal version of my complaint that leftist social movement fight shy of formalization, of institutionalization,–and thus rob themselves of the chance to have a real impact. That essay is called “Intellectuals in Dark Times” and focuses in on the allergy to leaders, to any division of labor in contemporary movements like Occupy. And I am responding to my friend’s essay on the attempt to use the notion of “rights” to address environmental issues.

The usual line of thought is that social movements often fight shy of institutionalization, but that it is very hard for them to consolidate any gains if their goals are not taken up by some institution. So, for example, a social movement can advocate for no discrimination on the basis of sexual preference, but until there are anti-discriminatory laws that formally recognize equality, provide means of redress against discrimination, and sanctions against those who discriminate, then the social movement can’t move from “protest” about the way things are to an actual change in prevailing conditions.

It is certainly—and importantly—the case that social movements are often very good at mobilizing a constituency toward some end, and in changing general cultural attitudes. A classic case is the gay rights movement. Another is MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving). Attitudes toward gays and toward driving while drunk changed noticeably (and astoundingly quickly), largely because of those movements. But I don’t see how that attitude shift is consolidated unless translated (as it was in both cases) into formal, legal changes.

So I would look at #MeTOO and Black Lives Matter in similar ways. They are raising an issue to public awareness and (let’s hope) changing attitudes. But until there are also legal sanctions for the police who shoot unarmed blacks (seems to be very, very, very slow progress on that front) or for men who harass women (still a long way to go), I can’t see those movements as successful. What troubles me are the movements that fight shy of any kind of political, legal outcome at all.

The notion of “prefigurative” has become very common not just in the literature but in the expressed views of the anti-globalization activists. I had not read Todd Gitlin’s book on Occupy when I wrote the essay. It’s a good book and a quick read. He bends over backwards to be sympathetic to Occupy’s anarchism and is good on its refusal to dignify politicians with the authority of being petitioned to. Instead, the theory went, Occupy would create the society it wanted—not request some imagined powerful others (the politicians) to redress wrongs or reform the corrupt society. The trouble of course was that Occupy’s alternative society proved unsustainable. You need a lot of things to have a functioning society—and Occupy was against many of those things on principle.

Gitlin addresses the leaderless stuff as well. So, yes, let’s say that #MeToo is leaderless. It really is a spontaneous outbreak, in many places at once, and helpfully consolidated by the new digital media. No one voice stands out among the rest—and part of its glory is that egalitarianism. The issue for me is: What next? The open chorus of voices can continue quite some time, until people get tired of that, and move on to the next thing. Some participants in Occupy, as Gitlin documents, were aware of this problem. Members of the movement had to have something to do. Maybe we should call this the tyranny of narrative. There has to be some sense of forward movement, not just the continual repetition of the same. (I have the same objection to the left’s marches. Just to keep marching accomplishes nothing.)

So leadership at the very least must devise tactics, things to do that will move the ball forward. (Hardt and Negri in Assembly concede this point, but then claim the movement itself, as mass leaderless democracy, must devise the strategy. But their tactics/strategy bright line is hard to understand and, I would think, even harder to maintain in practice.)

Even more, I am arguing that moving the ball forward necessitates at some point the moment of institutionalization. Which, of course, makes your question about the definition of institution central. In some sense it’s a tautology: an institution is any formal structure that a) codifies its goals and procedures, and b) establishes the means to ensure its sustainability (over, at least, the medium term). What are those “means” of sustainability? For starters, at the minimum, the human and financial resources required to, so to speak, stay in the field. There must be people who are doing the work and who we can be sure will be doing the work next week and (we hope) next year. And there also must be people (the wider base) that can be called upon on for set occasions when a more massive presence is needed. And there must be the money to support those people and the movement’s chosen activities. Additionally, it is probably inevitable that there be some kind of by-laws (some rules of procedure) and some kind of division of labor (which may very well lead to hierarchy and also to forms of accountability). The “formality” of institutions comes, then, from having a defined set of goals, an explicit codification of procedures and tasks that are aimed toward achieving that goal, along with a plan for raising the resources required to do the work to reach the goal.

In order to get that far, it also seems inevitable that you are going to need a) the wordsmiths who articulate the movement’s goals and core attitudes in ways that inspire people to join the movement and keep them inspired once they are in the door (the intellectuals if you will) and b) those who hold themselves personally accountable for the movement’s advancement toward its goals and inspire others to also assume similar responsibility (call these people leaders). There are other roles, but you get the idea.

So I am not taking “the law” per se as the prototypical institution. I guess I would say that an institution is “legal” once it has the political (or state) authority for its articulated codes and procedures to be enforced generally (i.e. over the whole citizenry of a state). Many movements, then, will aim for its specific goals to become “legal” in exactly that sense. But not all movements will have that aspiration. Think of an artistic movement; it will be much looser in both its institutional forms than the civil rights movement (with its various organizations like the SNCC, the NAACP etc.) and with no desire to achieve legal reform. But even something like Impressionism or Abstract Expressionism will depend on something more formal than a movement even if less formal than a full-blown institution if it is to thrive. It will need to have fairly self-consciously formed networks of galleries, news and other media outlets, patrons, sympathetic museums, and a sense of who is in the fold and who isn’t. It can’t, in other words, only exist in “presence,” in the face-to-face moments of direct interaction (which is what Occupy seems to aspire to—and, oddly enough, we can also say was often Arendt’s utopian vision of the political as an ephemeral “space of appearances” created by a group being together. It is that Arendtian vision that Hardt and Negri–and Judith Butler in a different key that I find more convincing–are reaching for in their celebrations of “assembly,” the people coming out together to share time in the streets.)

So I guess I am arguing that I don’t see how a movement like #MeToo can advance its political agenda without institutionalizing to some extent—and that it can’t institutionalize without having some intellectuals and some leaders. Does that—and here is the fear—make me a Leninist? This worry is deeply ingrained in the left, quickly described (if over simplistically) as the debate between anarchists and advocates of “the party.” It has more recently been re-inscribed as the debate between “direct” (or “participatory”) democracy and some acceptance of the need for “representation.”

Now I am really going to try your patience because I am going to tie your essay on rights to this classic leftist debate. It is very common to think of rights as “legitimate claims.” This is a very “pragmatic” way of theorizing rights—where “pragmatic” here refers less to Deweyean pragmatism than to the “pragmatics” of the linguists, which can be tied back to Wittgenstein’s insistence that the meaning of word resides in its use. So think of rights as part of a “language game” or even of a “form of life.” As a move in the language game, to state I have a right to something is to make a claim on the other players of the game. That claim must, first, be recognized by those others as legitimate, as a claim to which they are accountable, answerable. If I claim my right to your car, I will be dismissed out of hand. But if I assert a claim to a high school education, that claim is most likely deemed legitimate within the prevailing language game in the US, but perhaps not when a teenage girl makes it in Afghanistan.

So, for starters, when we talk about rights, we are talking about (contestable) claims that we make upon one another. A constitution and bill of rights represent attempts to place certain rights beyond contestability, to say that they are, for once and for all, legitimate. Of course, that doesn’t stop them from being contested in individual court cases, but the constitution and bill of rights is supposed to provide solid grounds for deciding such cases.

The constitution, of course, also does something else. It established that the state’s power will be placed in the service of protecting those rights herein designated as legitimate. The problem Arendt highlights—and that became salient in the wake of World War II but which Madison already was writing about in the 1780s—is how to handle situations where what we have come to think of as rights must be protected against the state’s abrogation of them. What is the enforcing, protective power in that case? And also what about people who are “stateless.”? To whom do such people even address their claim—and who will protect them since they are not recognized as any state’s responsibility? The notion of “human rights” was created in the context of also creating international organizations such as the United Nations as an attempt to address this dilemma. This attempted solution has proved woefully inadequate to solve the problem, but nothing better has been devised (or instituted).

Now, on top of that crisis/failure, comes the dilemma your essay highlights: how to think the rights of non-human entities. Since I think of rights as discursive, as established within a language game of call (claim) and response, I don’t see how the rights of non-human entities can figure into the game unless they are “represented” by humans. That is, there is an inevitable “translation” here. We can think of that translation as going in either direction (I don’t think it makes much difference which description we choose. Others might argue it makes a huge difference.) Alternative one would be to say that we take a notion of “rights’ developed in human political discourse as a way of talking about, adjudicating, and acting upon the claims we have/make upon one another as we attempt to live together in a shared world—and we now transpose that notion of rights as a handy way to talk about the claims non-human entities could/would/should make (if they could talk) as co-inhabitants of that same shared world. So humans are “extending” rights to non-human entities by couching the perceived needs of those entities in “rights talk.” (The anti-humanists would object here that the perceiving of those needs is done by humans.)

The alternative would be to say that non-human entities have various ways of communicating their needs and requirements to us—but (I would still argue) it requires an act of translation, from those non-human communications into the human language of rights, to have the non-human claims enter into our political discourse of rights. In other words, I don’t see how the non-human enters the realm of rights except as voiced by a human advocate. I know radical anti-humanists hate this conclusion, but I don’t see how to avoid it.

So we seem to be left with: Rights talk is a human contrivance—so all application of rights talk to the inhuman involves a questionable translation of humanist terms to a sphere distinct from the human. (I think your essay was tending in that direction.) The only way out of this would be to let the non-human speak for itself. But I guess I am with Wittgenstein: if the lion could talk, we wouldn’t understand him. No understanding across that barrier without translation—with the sense that yes, of course, something is going to be lost in the translation, but that’s the best we’ve got. The search for pristine, perfect solutions aspires to a logically unassailable state that is unattainable, while also imagining a moral purity that sees every trade-off as reprehensible. William James says the “trail of the human serpent is over all.” Once within human languages, we are doomed to “representation” with all its imperfections and inadequacies.

Goaded by those imperfections, we keep on writing, thinking maybe the next time I will say it better.

Honor

Arendt never appeals to honor—and, no doubt, she would find the concept antique. But both her celebration of “public happiness” and her comments on the desire to excel in public, to live a life worthy of becoming the stuff of stories, point to her desire to find some account of motives that transcend the desire to satisfy material, bodily needs. On the one hand, denigration of the body has a long history in Western thought, with both Greek and Christian variants. On the other hand, that suspicion of the “material” gains a new impetus in the 1950s from the twin perspective of Arendt’s anti-Marxist repudiation of materialist philosophy and her equally ant-consumerist suspicions of “materialist” consumer culture.

Love of the world, then, is meant to describe a commitment that extends beyond the selfish desire to accumulate material goods, just as her resolutely non-material “action” and its production of an ephemeral “space of appearances” introduces something utterly distinct from the necessities connected to “life.”

What I am pursuing here is her account of what motivates “action” (understood in her strict sense of the term). The good action directly strives for is called, at various times in her work, “freedom,” or “renown.” Actors want to win the admiration of others even as they also (in Nietzschean fashion) simply enjoy the expenditure of energy that is action.

I see a double problem here, a Scylla and Charybdis, if you will. Scylla is the contempt for the body, for mere life. We have already seen this with Ruskin declaring “life is the only wealth” and then going on to tell us the terms upon which different living creatures should accept death. Arendt’s version of this line of thinking comes in her meditations on Socrates in her late work. Living out of harmony with oneself, sacrificing one’s integrity and moral ideals simply in order to survive in a despicable regime like Hitler’s, is to win life on terms where it is not worth having. So we get two things here: a standard by which some lives are ruled deficient, and a denigration of the bodily as (at best) an insufficient basis of value judgments or (at worst) a positive detriment to making value judgments. In the second case, whatever pertains to the body and its needs should be ruled out of court when considering the worth of a human life. Pushed even further, to the Hegel master/slave phenomenon, the person who would prioritize “life” over other (more worthy) standards ends up a slave—and (perhaps) rightfully so. This final bit is not Hegel because he has his dialectical reversal coming, but it is not clear that Arendt offers any such escape. She seems simply contemptuous of the modern consumer who has no sense of or taste for the joys of public life. Such people are living swinish (Mill), unfree (Arendt) lives.

The Charybdis here is trying to identify a non-pernicious standard of value that doesn’t simply reduce to supplying material needs. We certainly seem to need a non-utilitarian, non-economic, set of motives—and those motives should, in some form or another, include moral considerations addressing our desired relations to others and to the planet. Reductionism (Kenneth Burke’s “debunking”) can only lead to cynicism. If everyone is always out for the main chance; if it’s the struggle for life that overwhelms all else, then we get the macho “eat or be eaten” with its concomitant scorn for all the sentimental claptrap about decency, rights, love, altruism etc. Yesterday’s New York Review of Books offers a poignant example. James Shapiro reviews a new interpretation of Hamlet that basically argues that the play shows Shakespeare revealing humanist claptrap to be the hot air that it really is. Hamlet delays because he can’t face up to the realpolitik of courtly life, while spouting half-baked humanist truisms that he has neither mastered nor believed. Hamlet is a fatuous young fop—and the play reveals his fatuousness. And Shakespeare is a complete nihilist. A perfect reading for our current political moment. There are no barriers of any sort (religious, moral, humanist) against sheer brute power.

When Arendt comes to this point, in her meditations on morality under the supreme conditions of Nazi rule, she can only conclude that the kind of integrity, the felt need to live a life in accord with the moral principles one had understood as one’s own, is rare, but not impossible or utterly unknown. She famously says that the Nazis showed that most people will change their moral code as easily as they will change their table manners. (She probably should have said as easily as they will change the kinds of clothes they wear in response to changes in fashion. We also have Shakespeare’s marvelously cynical statement in The Tempest –spoken by the villain Antonio—that “For all the rest,/They’ll take suggestion as a cat laps milk;/They’ll tell the clock to any business that/We say befits the hour” (Act 2, sc 1, 289-92). Most people will say what the powerful tell them to say.) In short, Arendt has only a very thin reed to offer us; there will be some who will die rather than live the life totalitarianism puts on offer, but only “some” and they will not be effective in face of the ruthless totalitarians. A very short step from cynicism—or maybe the better term in despair.

Despair is certainly one quite understandable response to our dark times. And maybe the long bloody track of human history makes a sensible response altogether to “the human condition.” For we can consider one last twist of the knife: honor (or morality) might seem, if it exists, a bulwark against sheer power. But then honor and morality themselves are so often used to justify violence. Honor killings, as well as the fact that “honor” is so central to warrior cultures, reminds us that the “doux commerce” of the bourgeoisie was supposed to usher in a kinder and gentler era. The bourgeois critique of honor is hardly entirely off-base; the same can be said of the atheists’ critique of sectarian violence. The Nietzschean conclusion that humans can turn anything into the occasion for oppression and violence appears to hold. Despair and misanthropy seem to follow in course, accompanied by a fierce sarcasm about all the high-falutin’ words with which humans dress up their shitty behavior to one another—and to non-humans.

I want a standard of decency that will hold, some kind of barrier against the flood of exploitation. I don’t see one on the horizon at the moment.

Arendt on Life (Continued)

At times Arendt appears to believe (desire?) that action be “pure” in the same exact way that Kant tries to disengage (in Critique of Judgment) the aesthetic from any “interest.” Action would be unmotivated, a pursuit purely for its own sake, unproductive. That stance can seem a form of vitalism (ironically returning us to the “life” that Arendt is trying to spurn.) Action for its own sake, in an almost Nietzschean way, is the outflow of the energy of the living being. Taken a bit less mechanically, a bit more Romantically, this outflow can be considered “expressive.” It manifests (in the space of appearances) the being form which it emanates. There is more than a little expressionism in Arendt on action. After all, she tells us action is identity disclosing; even more, she suggests that action is identity creating. Like a speaker who doesn’t know what she thinks or believes before the words are spoken, the agent in Arendt discovers who she is in the act of acting. The “natality” that Arendt ties to the “miracle” of acting is, first and foremost, the appearance of a unique being in the world. “Plurality” is Arendt’s name for this singularity, for the fact that every living human (perhaps every living being, although Arendt probably believes only humans are capable of action) is distinctive. The “world” in Arendt is diminished, its plurality compromised, if any single human is denied the “freedom” that enables “action.” That is the over-riding sin of totalitarianism, its hostility to plurality, its attempt to reduce all human singularity to “the same.”

Pursuing this logic, “meaning” is the product of “action” being taken up by the community, which tells “stories” about the actions of its members. We can’t know the meaning of our actions in advance (just as the consequences of action are also unpredictable). Meaning is a communal product, dependent on what J. L. Austin calls “uptake.” A good example is saying something unintentionally funny. The fact that I didn’t mean it to be funny is under-determinative of the meaning that my statement acquires. No one owns or can control the meaning of an action or a statement. Rather, meaning unfolds in the intersubjective exchanges between people located in the world, in the space of appearances. Thus, action both constitutes that space of appearances (as described in the last post) and initiates the interchanges that create meaning. Here again Arendt seems Hegelian; although she doesn’t use the language of “recognition,” she does seem to believe that action and identity only acquire substance—a meaning, even a reality—when witnessed by others and taken up by them through some kind of response (debate, agreement, and story are all modes of response that her work considers). Love of the world, then, is partly love for (and care of) the enabling conditions of selfhood. If each being strives to persist in being (Spinoza’s conatus), then the world is required for that persistence to register (as it were), for it to be perceived, experienced. Self-consciousness—the ability to understand that one is enjoying “freedom”—depends on the existence of the self in communication with others, an interaction that creates, even as it requires, “the world,” the polis.

The paradox, then, is that life (“bare life”) does not require the polis—which is the source of Arendt’s worry that life-obsessed humans will not love the world, will pursue the swinish pleasures of satisfying the necessities of bodily persistence, and neglect striving for meaning, freedom, and identity. This is the element of aristocratic hauteur in her thought—not to mention an implied boundary between humans (capable of freedom and the self-conscious attachment to the worldly, political conditions of its achievement) and non-humans (governed by the relentless, unthinking pursuit of life’s necessities). The non-humans labor, humans act. Which has the disturbing Aristotelean corollary that humans who only labor are best understood as sub-human.

Action, then, is the guarantee of humanness, so it does have a product: the very distinction between a free life and a life tied to necessities. Judith Butler, rightly in my view, objects at precisely this point that Arendt “naturalizes” a distinction that should, rather, be understood as produced by power. (A basic application of the Foucualdian notion of “productive power.”) It is human social arrangements, established and maintained by coercive and discursive power, that relegates some to a life of labor and others to the enjoyment of freedom. Furthermore, the very distinction between labor and action is produced discursively to denigrate one form of human behavior over the other. Cooking food is not inherently (“naturally”) and for all time ‘meaningless.” The foodie revolution of the past thirty years attests to the ways that the meaning of activities shifts radically over time and in different social contexts. There is plenty to say about how the emergence of celebrity chefs introduces new insidious distinctions into a practice (cooking and eating) common to all humans, but there can be no denying that the meaning of those practices has been considerably altered. The status of Arendtian labor is hardly fixed in the ways she seems to think it is. Meanings are much more fluid that her triad of “labor, work, and action” indicates. (Several Arendt scholars have called that triad “ontological,” and see it as establishing the fundamental grounding of her argument in The Human Condition). Her mistake was taking the ground as fixed, as non-mutable.

Life in Arendt, then, can be seen as having two different drives: the first one is to sustain itself by securing the necessities (food, shelter) required to survive, the second if to secure meaning and freedom. She is afraid pursuit of the first will overwhelm a desire to satisfy the second. But she rather muddies the water by trying to describe the action that would secure meaning and freedom as unmotivated, taking freedom to mean something we are not compelled to do, but only do for its own sake. Thus, she is 1) not clear about the motives that underlie “free action,” and 2) afraid that under- or un-motivated “action” will not be attractive enough, not be compelling enough, to insure that humans actually undertake it.

Finally, Arendt introduces yet another motive for love of the world. The polis is not only a space of appearances that allows us to acquire a meaningful identity through the interaction with others, but also a form of “organized remembrance.” It turns out that she believes we have a deep desire to leave a trace of our existence, that our response to a self-consciousness about death (suggesting, again, that knowing we will die distinguished humans from other living creatures) is to create a social structure that allows for (hardly guarantees) we will be remembered. That drive for remembrance underwrites actions that aim to be memorable; in short, we crave fame. We want to be the stuff of stories, to exist in the mouths of others. We should love the world because only something that persists after our own lives are over can provide a means toward our being remembered after our deaths. Machiavellian virtú, which Arendt associates with virtuosity, is the agonistic striving to be memorable, to be extraordinary, which is inevitably competitive and comparative. Arendt appears to endorse the fierce competitiveness of the Greek heroes of The Iliad, even though it seems plausible to me to see their boasts and insults as hyper-masculine and sadly adolescent posturings that justify an aggression that is hardly appealing. Not every one gets to be remembered; only the great.

Two final comments: life, Arendt seems to be saying, is only fully satisfying if we can claim a victory over death insofar as we will be remembered after our life is done. Thus, even as she denigrates “life” as the supreme motive, she ends up wanting a victory of life over death—and uses “action” as a means to garner that victory. It is, it seems, not so easy to banish “life” as the supreme motive. Instead, what really seems to be the crux is not “life” versus “non-life,” but (instead) bodily life versus some notion of a “higher” (more meaningful, more self-conscious) life. We are invested in “life”—and, even more, in our own individual life and its persistence. In the “higher” form, that investment entails a stake in achieving an identity through action in the space of appearances, and in having that unique identity, recognized (minimally) and admired (maximally) during our lifetimes and remembered after our deaths.

Still, even if we conclude that Arendt cannot banish life as fully from our imagination of the polis as she wants to do, we can accept the performative paradox that troubles her as worthy of some worry, even though I take her anxieties on this score overblown. We ensure the survival of a language every time we use it to communicate. A language exists and persists by virtue of its being used; nothing else secures that existence. Yet speakers of the language only contribute to its survival inadvertently. In talking with others, I am not aiming to keep my language alive. Of course, in some circumstances, a language can be seen as endangered and various linguistic activities can be undertaken with the explicit aim of preserving the language. But in a thriving speech community, with a large number of members, no one is speaking with the purpose of preserving the language. (In this vein, I would argue that grammarians, those who teach language in schools, are, in fact, futilely trying to hold back the changes internal—and inevitable—to any language in use. But that’s another story).

Arendt’s worry seems to be that, in pursuing life, the persistence of the space of appearances, the public square that is the polis, will not be insured. Unlike a language that survives precisely because it is being used, the space of appearances might disappear because people lose their taste for “public happiness.” The split she introduces between labor and action, a split between pursuing necessities and acting freely, means that “bare life” could proceed (maybe even flourish) in the absence of action, the loss of “the world.” Maybe we will (as a species) lose our longing for fame, our desire to be remembered after our deaths. Again, the hint of an aristocratic melancholy at the disappearance of “honor” as a motivating factor for the bourgeoisie lingers in Arendt’s work. If “getting and spending” comes to be the all in all, “the world” will be lost—and with it any hope to be remembered.

Enough for now. I will try to think about “honor” in subsequent posts.

Arendt On Life and Love of the World

Arendt is famously adamant that politics cannot and should not devote itself to issues focused on the maintenance of life. Attending to such issues can only lead to disaster, as exemplified by the French Revolution being hijacked by the enrages. Lurking underneath her analysis of the French Revolution, one suspects, is a fierce anti-communism. The problem with Marxism (she implies without ever fully stating) is that it turns politics over to “questions of life,” to precisely “economic” issues, and thus a) loses what is distinctive and valuable about the political and b) leads to the massive infliction of death, a terror that makes the sins of Robespierre pale in comparison.

Why doesn’t Arendt condemn Marxism forthrightly? Because she is appalled by the know-nothing anti-communism of McCarthy and his ilk in the 1950s America and does not want to be welcomed into their camp as a fellow traveler. But, as starkly as Hayek, Arendt insists that the economy is private and must remain private. The dire consequences of mixing economic and politics are actually not that far different in Arendt’s analysis as in Hayek’s. He predicts “serfdom,” she sees an inability to access the “freedom” that action enables (where action—as distinct from labor and work– is only possible in the political realm.) Only action, in Arendt’s theory, is free. Labor and work unfold under the sign of “necessity.” And it is fair to say that in both Hayek and Arendt, “justice” (or, at least, “social justice” which concerns itself with a fair distribution of material goods along with equal protection under the law and equal access to political participation) gets short shrift. Very explicitly in Hayek, who fulminates against the “mirage” of social justice and sees “envy” as the only motivation driving any effort to achieve social justice. But almost as explicitly in Arendt, who seems to think the attempt to achieve such justice by the French revolutionaries as a destructive quest to the impossible. To attach politics to the promise of ending poverty is to raise hopes for a goal that cannot be reached—and the resultant disappointment generates a fury that tears society apart. In On Revolution, Arendt appears as fatalistic as Hayek about the possibility of achieving anything remotely like economic equality. Rather, political equality can be achieved, but only by building an impenetrable border between inevitable economic inequality and the equality that is to reign in the “space of appearances.” One type of status (economic status) is to have no impact, no bearing on a different kind of status, the political status enjoyed by the citizen.

The problem in the real world, of course, is that status and power don’t work that way. Power clings to status, but is mobile (extremely so) from one form of status to another. You can’t build a wall to keep economic power from generating political power. Rousseau was right to say that economic inequality was fatal to democracy. Plutocracy is the almost inevitable result of tolerating large economic inequalities.

Arendt does have an escape clause in her reflections on these issues—one that she, oddly enough, borrows from Marx. Oddly because she is generally anti-Marxist (because he substitutes economics for politics) and because the notion she does adopt is one of the most implausible Marxist tenets. Economic matters, Arendt claims in several places, are merely matters of “administration,” not of politics. Marx, of course, argued that the state would wither away in a classless society, leaving only the question of the “administration of things” (a wonderfully vague phrase). The idea seems to be that such administrative matters are conflict-free, simple questions of means. Politics is the realm of conflict, of argument, of disagreement—which Marx abhors and wants to abolish and which Arendt celebrates and wants to enhance. But such Arendtian conflict is never to be over material things—or, at least, over the distribution of material things. Or something like that. I am not the first to complain that it is not clear what Arendtian politics is “about.” She wants a free space of appearances where opinions are enunciated—and sees that speaking in public in agonistic deliberation with one’s equals as uniquely identity forming. But she rarely, if ever, considers the end point of those deliberations. In fact, she insists that the “action” which is epitomized by that public speaking is “unproductive.”

Now, in one sense, I think it fair to say that Arendt’s idea is something like this. We can all have an “opinion” about whether or not a bridge should be built over the river. We can offer reasons in a public debate about this decision, but there is no “truth” of the matter. Politics, then, would encompass the deliberation. But once the decision to build the bridge is made, its actual construction is a matter of “administration.” You call in the engineers and they get it done. It is not a matter of opinion, something we can argue about, to construct a bridge that can actually carry traffic without collapsing. “Truth,” which she calls “pre-political” (or maybe should be considered “apolitical”) takes over when it comes to the engineering decisions.

An obvious problem, of course, is that many “administrative” matters are much less cut and dried than building a bridge. (And even with the bridge, there will be disagreements about its look, and constraints connected to budget, amounts of traffic, availability of materials etc., some of which will entail debate beyond the expertise of the engineers.) Thus, for example, we can agree, after deliberation, that we want to decrease infant mortality rates. But there are no cut and dried methods that advance that goal, while there are also trade-offs involved (i.e. non-desirable side effects) with any method we do choose. There will be disagreements, then, about effectiveness and about the extent to which we should tolerate negative side-effects. Just as it proves difficult to segregate economic power/status from political power/status, it proves difficult to segregate “administrative decisions” from “political decisions” (about which we expect and even welcome disagreement and spirited debate).

Arendt’s escape clause does not only entail adopting the idea of non-political administration. She also, again in a quasi-Marxist way, seems to believe we are living in, or are on the verge of living in, a post-scarcity society. Our productive capacities have now reached the point where poverty will be abolished if we just administer things correctly. For the first time in history, every person (not just the citizen, not just the make head of household, not just the non-slave) will have the leisure to step into the public arena as an equal among equals. The terrible reign of labor, the drudgery of producing the necessities of life, will come to an end.

To Arendt, unlike Marx, the terrible danger is not that this potential to end poverty will be derailed by an unequal distribution of the goods modern technology produces. She pays no heed to the economic imperatives—namely the drives to profit and accumulation—that will generate “poverty amidst plenty.” Rather, she is worried (in classic 1950s style) about the psychological pathologies of “consumer culture.” What she, with a mandarin distaste and disdain that links her to her supposed nemesis Adorno, rails against are bourgeois subjects so enthralled by consumer goods, by the baubles connected to an enhanced life (but still “life”), that they will willingly work harder and harder to buy more “labor-saving devices,” instead of using their potential liberation from labor to embrace (non-productive) political action and freedom. The moderns have lost their taste for, even any understanding of, “freedom,” and are addicted to “necessities”—ever more elaborate meals, houses, clothes etc.

On another hand, action is not entirely non-productive. What it produces is the conditions of its own possibility. (Arendt was nothing if not a Kantian; she is always attuned to enabling conditions.) By appearing together in a public square to speak and act is to constitute that public square. It does not exist except when we inhabit it together doing our thing. When we go back home, it dissolves. (Arendt is mostly antipathetic to institutions, associating them with a reification akin to rigor mortis. Certainly, she never really considers the nature of institutions—and the way that they can provide some kind of stability, even permanence, that what is transitory. She obviously greatly prefers the spontaneity of what is produced through actual interactions over the formal structures that people devise to give those spontaneous productions a chance to survive beyond the moment of their creation.) Arendt, in her most grandiloquent moments, calls that public sphere, that space of appearances, “the world.”

Quite basically, Arendt says we will have disaster if we do not have people who “love the world.” Practically, that means people who prefer the political action that produces the space of appearances over the pleasures of consumption. Non-productive action produces nothing except the political realm that makes that action possible. The circularity here can be head-ache inducing. Still, Arendt insists that there is something to be called “public happiness” and that happiness is the “lost treasure of revolutions.” It is a heady pleasure discovered in the “acting in concert” that is a political movement, and is a pleasure disconnected from whether the movement succeeds in achieving its stated goals or not. For Occupy, the focus on that pleasure, on that creation together of a space to occupy, made even enunciating goals irrelevant—and even threatening. The point was this space the occupiers had created, not some leverage toward change in some other space. Creating our own world was the point, not influencing some other world.

What Arendt fears, then, is that attachment to “life” means attachment to consuming, to the pleasures associated with satisfying bodily necessities. She wants to advocate for a different set, a different order, of desires, ones connected to sociality, to what can only come into being intersubjectively, collectively.

Thus Arendt, like Ruskin and Mill, is worried about an attachment to life that is overly bodily, or bestial. (I am thinking of Mill’s famous passage about a swinish life as not worthy of human beings.) We have a “higher” destiny for Arendt—and she is contemptuous of those for whom working toward acquiring a second car and a vacation home provides more than enough meaning in their lives. We can go even further, I think, and say that Arendt buys into the basic premise of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic. To be overly attached to life, to have nothing that you value enough above life to actually forfeit life to preserve that more valuable thing, is to be a slave. Life can’t be the highest value is you want to be human, to be more than a beast. There must be something you identify as unlivable, some set of conditions that you would not tolerate, and that you would die rather than endure. (In her later work, Arendt will associate this idea with Socrates, and insist that “when the chips are down,” the “moral” human would have chosen death over submission to the evil—no matter if understood as radical or banal—of the Nazis.) To return to the vocabulary of The Human Condition and On Revolution, to take “life” as the highest value is to chain oneself to “necessity.” Life compels; it confines us to “labor,” to the production of those necessities that sustain it. Freedom, the opposite of necessity, is only available to the person who refuses to cede life such power, who refuses to says that its claims trump all others. “The world” is one way Arendt designates that “other” to life, that something else to which we can pledge allegiance, which we can learn (?) to “love.”

The story doesn’t end there. There are issues of “organized remembrance” and “meaning” still to be addressed. So that’s where I am headed next.