Seeking a Political Genius—In Vain?
It is cliché to say that a presidential election is important. And yet, the 2012 presidential election may be one of the most decisively meaningful elections in recent history. The world is now in year four of the global financial crisis. In addition to economic retraction that may last decades, there is social dislocation and political unrest. The level of frustration and cynicism is reaching all-time highs. And as Congress, the President, the Supreme Court, Universities, and businesses record their lowest levels of public trust and integrity, the only major U.S. institutions that continue to be well respected in public polls are the army and the police. If we do not somehow elect a President who can begin to halt or reverse the descent into political paralysis, the risks to the United States are enormous.
We are in need of a political genius, as Peggy Noonan wrote this month in the Wall Street Journal:
Why do people think we need a kind of political genius? Because they know exactly how deep our problems are and exactly how divided our nation is. We need a president who knows and understands politics because he knows and understands people and can galvanize them. When he speaks, you listen, in part because you believe he'll give it to you straight, in part because his views seem commonsensical, in part because something in his optimism pings right into your latent hopefulness, and in part because he's direct and doesn't hide his meaning in obfuscation, abstraction, clichés and dead words.
As much as we need an inspired political leader, it is clear beyond a doubt that neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney is such a leader. The result is that this election is as depressing as it is boring.
The promise of a Romney-Obama matchup is terrifying not simply because one of them will win; but more, because it is so obvious that these two politicians who actually are so similar in temperament and worldview would never actually engage in a contest of ideas. We have two candidates who are, quintessentially, moderate technocrats. Both are products of Harvard professional schools. Both candidates are essentially risk-averse technocrats. One worships data. The other worships experts. And both will do and say anything to win.
It is hard not to wish that Newt Gingrich had won the Republican nomination. At least his promise of hounding Obama to debate the core issues of American governance promised a consequential and engaging campaign.
Instead, this is a campaign not of ideas but of consultants. David Brooks, who writes today that the upcoming election is "incredibly consequential and incredibly boring all at the same time," gets this right:
Candidates know that they’d be punished for saying something unexpected — by the rich, elderly donors and by the hyperorthodox talk-show hosts. Instead of saying something new, now they just try to boost turnout within their own demographic niches and suppress turnout in the other guy’s niches.
Hannah Arendt taught that politics is about action that is spontaneous and surprising. Political action needs to be courageous and new, since only unexpectedly bold action can galvanize and unite a people. The political actor is one who can inspire, but inspiring action must above all be risky and extraordinary. For Arendt, freedom demands such leadership if life is to remain surprising, new, and human.
As Roberto Mangabeira Unger argued recently, we need a political leader who brings a wartime mentality to our contemporary crisis. Peggy Noonan from the right agrees. From all sides there is a longing for just such political leader, one that candidate Barack Obama promised to be four years ago. The falsity of that promise has hardened people against hope. The cynicism and dishonesty of both candidates is numbing. It is further diminishing our political culture, at a time when we hardly thought politics could sink lower and we can hardly afford to allow it to do so.
What would it mean to elect a leader who could revive American politics? That is, in fact, the question asked in the upcoming Arendt Center Conference, "Does the President Matter? Reflections on the American Age of Political Disrepair."
On the most obvious level, the President does matter. Of course some will benefit under President Romney and others under President Obama. But on the level that matters most—the regeneration of the political life of the United States—it is hard to see how this election means anything. Neither candidate is speaking to the whole country and neither has the ambition or the spark to inspire us to overcome the limitations of our selfishness, weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder, and more common things than we can do on our own.
—RB
The Highest Law of the Land
“The highest laws of the land (America) are not only the constitution and constitutional laws, but also contracts.”
-Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch, p. 131
Having published The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt turned her attention to the country around her. In a sequence of entries in her Denktagebuch for September 1951, she starts by referring to America as “the politically new” – these are thoughts that will eventually result in her argument in On Revolution . Her analysis has often been criticized from an historical point of view, especially as she refers to the Constitution as being the first to be established “without force, without ruling (archein) and being ruled (archesthai). “ Whatever the validity of these criticisms, they strike me as missing an essential point of her concerns. Arendt is trying to work out what she a few pages later calls “the central question of the coming (künftigen) politics,” a problem she sees as lodged in “the problem of the giving of laws.” (ibid, 141). Her aim is to describe a political (i.e. humanly appropriate) system that would not rest upon will and in particular on the will of the sovereign. “That I must have power (Macht) to be able to will, makes the problem of power into the central political fact of all politics that are grounded on sovereignty – all, that is, with the exception of the American.” (idem)
Her concern in these pages (130-143) centers around what a human society would be that was truly political. Her version of America is her entry into this question. What is striking about her discussion in the intervening (and other) pages is that she approaches this question explicitly through the lens of European philosophy. Thus she is attempting an answer to the question of “can we determine the particular excellence of the American polity by viewing it through the lenses of European thought?” The point is not to Europeanize America: it is to see if America does not in some manner constitute a potential instantiation of what has been thought in Europe over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The sequence of European thinkers she invokes is important. She first mentions Marx and then Nietzsche, each of whom she sees as part of and as makers of the “end of Western philosophy.” Marx is held to have inverted Hegel, Nietzsche the same for Plato. The point of her analysis of Marx and Nietzsche is to assert that they released thought from its bond to the “Absolute.” Indeed: to hold to the idea of an Absolute is to “make possible in the present unjust and bestial behavior.” (ibid, 133). As we know, this will be an ever-returning theme in her work. She expects to find in America the elements of the political that does not rest on an “absolute.”
At what might one look to find this vision of a non-absolute political? Nietzsche provides the opening to an answer. We are to look not to his doctrine of the revaluation of values but to his discussion of promising in the second essay of the Genealogy of Morals. She quotes: “To breed an animal with the right to make promises – is that not … the real problem of humans?” For Arendt, the foundation of a new “morality” lies in the right to make a promise; the promise makes possible human relations based on contract. And the grounding on contract, as she writes in the Denktagebuch, was for her the particular excellence of the American polity.
What is the implication of Arendt's claim that contract is the “highest law” and particular excellence of America? One answer is revealed by the end of extended quotation of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals where he indicates that the person who has the right to make promises can “ für sich als Zukunft gut sagen zu können,”a phrase that might be rendered as “able to give himself as answer for the future.” In Arendt’s gloss, this means that if in making a contract (which is what a promise is) one pledges that each will remain true to him-or herself as the person making the contract, then each has made his or her own being the foundation for a political space.
Such a grounding or foundation is not based either on will or on any external absolute. It is a matter, as the signers of the Declaration made clear, that we “mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” Temporally speaking, this means that what one did in the past remains alive as the present. Our political present will thereby be tied to the historical, although not, she notes, in a “weltgeschichtliche” [world-historical: i.e. transcendental] manner.
To make the implications of this clearer, she immediately turns to a consideration of Max Weber’s distinction between the “ethic of responsibility” (which she holds to be the foundation of the pragmatism and genius of American politics) as opposed to the “ethic of conviction,” which, she says, allows for anything as we cannot know “until the day of the Last Judgment” if our conviction be correct. The implication here is that if we base our polity on the conviction of the supposed correctness of our moral judgments (as opposed to our ability to be responsible to ourselves) we will be able to justify anything, as the validation for our claim can be infinitely postponed. (One has but to look at the claims made about bringing democracy to Iraq). Indeed, Arendt sees “central question of our time” to be a change in our ability to make valid moral judgments, that is ones the correctness of which is not postponed indefinitely. (ibid 138). She now turns to an examination of how various thinkers have dealt with the problem of moral judgment. After she worked her way through a partial rejection of the manners in which Hegel, Nietzsche, and the Kant of the Critique of Practical Reason respond to this main question, she turns to the Critique of the Power of Judgment. Those thoughts are not developed at this time in the Denktagebuch -- but they will concern her for the rest of her life.
What is striking here is how the approach from European philosophy brings out the importance of what is new in the American experiment. As Hamilton wrote in the first Federalist:
It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force. If there be any truth in the remark, the crisis at which we are arrived may with propriety be regarded as the era in which that decision is to be made; and a wrong election of the part we shall act may, in this view, deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind.
To which, in our present day, one may only wonder if at some point a “wrong election“ has not been made.
-Tracy B. Strong (UCSD)
Membership Update
We had a great weekend with lots of new members joining the Center! We are very excited to report that we are very close to reaching our goal! We have 84 new members and need only 16 more by tomorrow to reach out goal!
Please consider becoming a member. Learn more here.
The Splintering of Culture
Earlier this month I attended a lecture by Matthias Lilienthal, the former artistic director of Hebbel am Ufer (HAU). HAU as it is affectionately known in Berlin is an organization with three performance spaces in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin, and is one of the largest, best funded, and risk-taking performance theatre complexes in the world. As one of the most important and innovative avant garde theatre directors, Lilienthal has "created, instigated and nourished many of the most important developments in theatre in recent decades," according to Tom Sellar of Yale who introduced him.
Lilienthal was interviewed after his talk by Gideon Lester, my exciting new colleague who now is director of the theatre program at Bard.
While Lilienthal is an artistic director and has a background in the theatre, he calls himself a "booker" of talent more than an artist or a curator. He is committed to theatre that has social and political impact. His mission is to constantly create friction. Friction means in his telling, "to be polemic against society and be an urban laboratory for the future." That said, Lilienthal insists that he remains an artist, someone who in his words cares most about the aesthetic experience his works bring about.
Lilienthal discussed a number of his past projects to explain what he means by a theatre of friction. One of the most famous and interesting is FOREIGNERS OUT! SCHLINGENSIEF'S CONTAINER, a performance, installation, and movie that he produced in collaboration with the filmmaker Christoph Schlingensief.
FOREIGNERS OUT! premiered in Vienna in the summer of 2000, at a time of great anti-immigrant sentiment in Austria—it was shortly after the xenophobic politician Jörg Haider came to power in Austria. Schlingensief and Lilienthal put two large containers in the public square in front of the Viennese Opera house and filled them with 15 asylum seekers. Above the asylum seekers, the artists hung a sign that read: "Foreigners Out." They then gave the Austrian population the opportunity to vote which foreigner to expel from the country. Over 10,000 Austrians voted every day and the first person sent home was a Nigerian woman.
Lilienthal speaks of a "hysterical longing for reality in today's theatre." Much of his work and the work he "books" mixes reality with theatre. His most famous performance piece, performed all over the world, is "X Wohnungen" or "X Apartments." Artists are asked to create artistic experiences that last up to ten minutes and take place in private apartments or houses. In one example that Lilienthal showed a clip from during his talk, audience members in groups of two are led into apartments of immigrants in Cologne where they are told to kneel in front of doors with keyholes. Through the keyholes they watch a Muslim woman in a burka and hijab strip naked and recline on a couch. They are then interrupted, given tea and told to go out.
Lilienthal explains that "we are playing a private reality, with voyeurism and with exhibitionism." His participatory performance art is "a kind of playful treatment of reality. You are playing with prejudgments against migrants. You are playing with your own voyeurism." The effort is partly to create discussions about Islam, religion, and sexuality. But it above all, in his words, to "to bring together experiences of reality."
Lilienthal was quite critical of the New York art scene, arguing that NYC artists are too commercial and that there is no meaningful artistic forum in the U.S. as there is in Germany. His point is that his HAU stages have, in his telling, become the center of German and European art worlds, presenting all the most interesting and most important artists from around the world under a single umbrella. He lamented the fact that there was no similarly dominant and unifying artistic space in NY or in the U.S. New York, he said provocatively, in the East Village, is a provincial state.
Lester asked Lilienthal what would he have done in NYC had he accepted a job here? He answered, (I am paraphrasing here),"I would have presented art that offers a polemic against society. I would like everyone to know me and then I would have been... perhaps they would kill me after a year."
There is something both noble and anachronistic in Lilienthal's Socratic dream to create art so full of friction and power that he would be killed for it. It is a noble dream because it imagines that art, like philosophy, might still have the power and importance to be seen as a threat to the state or the society. It is anachronistic because art and philosophy have long since lost such centrality.
When I asked Lilienthal about this, his answer was that it was different in Berlin, where the arts are more central and given more public financing and public attention. But I don't accept the argument that the arts are so much more important in Berlin than in NYC. In Berlin, as everywhere today, the intellectual world is just no longer governed by a unified aesthetic or a single dominant medium. There is a mass culture, but the premise of the mass culture is consumerism. Everybody buys what they want and art connoisseurs consume what they like. Most intellectuals and educated people now consume art and news that is hardly distinguishable from middle or low-brow tastes; indeed, the distinction between high and low is now illegitimate. But more important even than that, is the fact that those who do like the best art or best philosophy or best theatre or the best philosophy do not agree on what the "best" is.
One sees this fracturing of culture everywhere. The New York Times was, for a period of time, the arbiter of what mattered in the United States. That is no longer the case and has not been so for decades. It is not the Internet that brought about the factionalization of cultural and political opinion, but, on the contrary, the loss of any single or dominant opinion made the cacophony of voices and platforms on the Internet appealing and powerful.
Similarly, philosophy is broken into analytic and continental schools, and within each there are esoteric sub-schools so specialized that advanced papers and thinking can be read and understood by only dozens of people around the world. The same fission occurs in literature and art as well. Who now feels the need to read all the books profiled in the NY Times Book Review or the New York Review of Books? The selection criteria are ever more arbitrary and there are no longer any acknowledged gateways to culture.
There are, of course, still important artists and writers, but they appeal to ever-more specialized and localized crowds of followers. Lilienthal's dream of a unified artistic world with a single influential cultural world is long gone. And this is true in Berlin as well as in NYC. We will never again have a situation where the chattering classes are all reading the same books and seeing the same shows. The culture is simply too diffuse and differentiated and democratized. There are no measures of quality that are widely accepted. So what we have are simply sub-groups and sub-genres and sub-cultures.
A version of this argument is made by Peter Sloterdijk in his essay Themes from the Human Zoo. Sloterdijk writes:
Because of the formation of mass culture through the media—radio in the First World War and television after 1945, and even more through the contemporary web revolution—the coexistence of people in the present societies has been established on new foundations. These are, as it can uncontrovertibly be shown, clearly post-literary, post-epistolary, and thus post-humanistic. Anyone who thinks the prefix `post' in this formulation is too dramatic can replace it with the adverb `marginal'. Thus our thesis: modern societies can produce their political and cultural synthesis only marginally through literary, letter-writing, humanistic media. Of course, that does not mean that literature has come to an end, but it has split itself off and become a sui generis subculture, and the days of its value as bearer of the national spirit have passed. The social synthesis is no longer—and is no longer seen to be—primarily a matter of books and letters. New means of political-cultural telecommunication have come into prominence, which have restricted the pattern of script-born friendship to a limited number of people. The period when modern humanism was the model for schooling and education has passed, because it is no longer possible to retain the illusion that political and economic structures could be organized on the amiable model of literary societies.
What Sloterdijk rightly sees is that literate means of cultural analysis have lost their once-dominant place in the social and political formation of society. Books and theatre and artworks have been replaced by mass entertainments and diversions, so that literate works are relegated to sub-genres of importance only to their particular fans and followers. Art and philosophy, therefore, become socially and politically marginal.
Instead of seeking to bring back a unified culture of art in which artists matter to the social and political worlds, as Lilienthal dreams, it would be more radical and more honest to admit that we live today in a world in which those who make art, write literature, and think philosophy matter ever less. To think the challenges of doing art and thinking in a world immune to the charms of art and thought is the challenge we are faced with today.
Matthias Lilienthal's talk is fascinating and, as you can see, provocative, which is justification enough to spend one hour this weekend watching him. Thanks to Theatre Magazine for posting the video of the talk. Here is your weekend read.
-RB
HA! Journal Coming Soon
Coming this September, the inaugural edition of HA!, a new journal featuring essays by leading scholars & intellectuals, reflecting our last two fall conferences. The volume is available only to Arendt Center Supporter Members and is part of our 10 day/100 member campaign.
Thomas Jefferson on Thinking
"The worst day in a man's life is when he sits down and begins thinking about how he can get something for nothing."
-Thomas Jefferson
The Intimate World
“What in thinking only occasionally and quasi-metaphorically happens, to retreat from the world of appearances, takes place in aging and dying as an appearance… in this sense thinking is an anticipation of dying (ceasing, ‘to cease to be among men’) just as action in the sense of ‘to make a beginning’ is a repetition of birth.”
-Hannah Arendt, -Denktagebuch, p. 792
One of the wonderful aspects of reading the Denktagebuch is its peculiar intimacy. As with so much of Arendt’s way of thinking about the world, it is a kind of intimacy which is familiar, but unique and strange enough to make us rethink the place of that category in our lives, how we sense it and find it meaningful. The sense of intimacy is present from the very first entry – a long, fluid contemplation of responsiveness and evil written in the wake of her first visit to Germany (and Heidegger) after the war – to the last, when the notebooks trail off into a bare succession of dates and places.
It infuses each echo of her published work with a sense of its interconnection with a hundred fragmentary thoughts, occasions, meditations, and struggles. The Denktagebuch helps renew the liveliness of Arendt’s work as not just a set of arguments, but a profound, rich sensibility, a sensibility in the double sense of a way of sensing what is going on in the world around us, and the dense world-experience of a human, a thinker, a woman, a writer who set herself the gravid task of thinking what we are doing.
Of course, the intimacy found in Arendt’s notebooks was never going to be quite what we usually think of when we use the term. In general, Arendt’s is not a thought that we associate with intimacy. On the contrary, what distinguishes Arendt’s writing, even on the most personal topics, is its resolute publicity, its unwavering concern for what is common, what is shared, and what is political in writing: its specific capacity to make things appear to others. This resolutely public (or perhaps simply political) character to her analysis was a commitment that got her into trouble repeatedly when she moved into topics which were, for her American audience and beyond, violently emotionally charged. A consistent refrain, in the hostile reception of both the Eichmann essays for The New Yorker and “Reflections on Little Rock” in Dissent, was the apparent coldness or withdrawal with which her critics saw her as treating desperately dear subjects. So perhaps it is unsurprising that the peculiar intimacy of the Denktagebuch, even in the time when it was a quasi-private record for her own uses, was what might be called by the paradoxical name of political intimacy, the intimacy specific to what she calls here a “world of appearances.” What can intimacy even mean in a sensibility staunchly committed to rejecting our historical prioritization of the internal (the soul, the mind, the self) over our external lives of appearing to and acting with others?
This passage comes from a section of the Denktagebuch that not only provides an idea of what that form of intimacy might be, but does so in a way that brings out the intimacy already present throughout her work. The 27th notebook is the last substantive one, and it is saturated with thoughts about ends. The two senses of the word in English and German weave in and out of her entries: both purposes – the purposes of thought, of philosophy, of acting, of being in the world – and finality, conclusions, ultimately death itself. At times, there is a deep, almost bitter sadness to the omnipresence of the end in this notebook. She concludes in one entry with Kant’s thoughts in Critique of Judgment about the ends of human life that “no one would go through life again of their own free will.” At other times, there is an old contentment with the prospect of the end, as when she writes that “death is the price we the living pay for having lived. To not want to pay this price, is miserable.” Birth, natality, the human capacity to bring something new into the world was always central to Arendt’s idea of a public and action. Here, death and thought appear together for the first time as the inverse, a retreat initially in mind and then in body from the world in which we write the stories of our lives with others. And the idea of thought as death’s companion, and our companion in the end, gives the first hint of what this uniquely Arendtian intimacy-in-publicity holds.
The Life of the Mind, Arendt’s un-ended work, gives us glimpses of something that comes out even more strongly in the Denktagebuch. In the life-process of Arendt’s thought there seems to be a constant attempt to return to what was put aside, to reckon with, and to a certain extent, redeem the things that at first glance in the earlier works seemed like ideas and practices that were supposed to be the problem or the threat. Her stunning elegies for Heidegger and Brecht – both neither pardon nor disavowal – reflect this process of problematization and partial redemption, turned from the analysis of concepts to telling the stories of lives lost. We should all be so lucky. And so it is here, in the Denktagebuch, in the case of endfulness and end-orientation. In a whole series of the earlier works, this end-orientation was the thing that most threatened what was supposed to be the Arendtian good, whether it was action or culture or the public itself. It was always the baunism of workers (The Human Condition) or philistines (“The Crisis in Culture”) that was the thing that threatened to remove from action and the political life what was peculiar to it. But in this section Arendt returns to the scene to do something like right by ends, to think about whether or not there is a place for endfulness and what that place might be.
In this notebook, thought is the dominion of ends, and the spontaneous, undetermined originality of action and the titanic worldly power of understanding find their end in thought’s retreat from the world’s appearances. Even in her darkest moments of facing the end this is not a tragedy to be mourned: it is simply the price of doing and being and living with others, the inescapable departure point of a world that we enter “confronted with what appears only once, with the sensuously perceptible” (780). After all, as Arendt cautions, action would disappear from the world in the moment of its enactment without being taken up and made a part of our collective story by a process of end-making. This necessary grave of the end gives the Human Condition in particular a different kind of normative bent than we might otherwise read in it – almost an odd kind of Platonism – in which it no longer appears that the natural instrumentality of work threatens everything around it, at least not simply so. Endfulness too has its place, indeed all of these familiar categories (labor, action, the social, the private) in their place are both necessary and productive. It is only those places where the messily amalgamated categories of our living in the world inevitably cross and mix that dangers, but perhaps also possibilities, are produced: every untidy palisade and nook of the shared world in which we can appear to each other.
This is, in the end, the sole place where that uniquely Arendtian sense of intimacy, a political intimacy, can exist. The intimacy of the Denktagebuch, which is no less present in Arendt’s confrontation with totalitarianism and is beautifully echoed in the struggles of those on this site with issues like the punishment of George Zimmerman and the decimations wrought by homophobic schooling systems, is not an intimacy of distilled selves but an intimacy of our selves with our world, an intimacy with what is shared and what forms, for good or for terrible ill, the fabric of what we can experience together. Arendt shows us what it means to be unblinkingly, meaningfully, at times painfully intimate with the human world. To engage in Arendtian politics is to enter into a relationship of intimacy, an intimacy with the terrible and the evil as much as with the beautiful and the good, and to find through that intimacy what we can do and who we can be with each other. And that intimacy, for Arendt, is what makes it possible for us to bear our ends.
-Ian Storey
Take Downs
If you are a political theorist or philosopher between 18 and 50, you probably had at least a passing flirtation with Slavoj Zizek. First of all, you can't avoid him. The man has written over 60 books in les than 30 years in addition to innumerable articles and interviews. Oh, and he has made two movies, including the humbly named Zizek! If you want more, there is the International Journal of Žižek Studies.
What to make of the literary, philosophical, and marketing phenomenon that is Slavoj Zizek?
Slavoj Zizek
John Gray tries to answer that question in this week's NYRB in what is one of the most engaging take downs of an academic star you will get to read.
Zizek is a pugilist and there is much to fight against. He well sees the hypocrisies and injustices of liberal democratic society. He begins with the premise that modern day liberal capitalism not only has won, but it is indestructible. It is not reformable. He does not see socialism as a legitimate alternative. He derides anarchism as conceding the power to those in control. So what does Zizek want? He wants to be in control. His is an unapologetic call for violent takeover of the state for the benefit of the dispossessed. If the state is violence, he insists, why not it be "our" violence. This is the reason for his support of dictators and tyrants like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.
It is striking that the course on which Hugo Chávez has embarked since 2006 is the exact opposite of the one chosen by the postmodern Left: far from resisting state power, he grabbed it (first by an attempted coup, then democratically), ruthlessly using the Venezuelan state apparatuses to promote his goals. Furthermore, he is militarising the barrios, and organising the training of armed units there. And, the ultimate scare: now that he is feeling the economic effects of capital’s ‘resistance’ to his rule (temporary shortages of some goods in the state-subsidised supermarkets), he has announced plans to consolidate the 24 parties that support him into a single party. Even some of his allies are sceptical about this move: will it come at the expense of the popular movements that have given the Venezuelan revolution its élan? However, this choice, though risky, should be fully endorsed: the task is to make the new party function not as a typical state socialist (or Peronist) party, but as a vehicle for the mobilisation of new forms of politics (like the grass roots slum committees). What should we say to someone like Chávez? ‘No, do not grab state power, just withdraw, leave the state and the current situation in place’? Chávez is often dismissed as a clown – but wouldn’t such a withdrawal just reduce him to a version of Subcomandante Marcos, whom many Mexican leftists now refer to as ‘Subcomediante Marcos’? Today, it is the great capitalists – Bill Gates, corporate polluters, fox hunters – who ‘resist’ the state.
Zizek's "full endorsement" of tyranny has won him many fans, including adoring youthful supporters. He played a bit part in Occupy Wall Street, largely as a internal critic of the anarchist tendencies of the movement. For Zizek, OWS was mistaken to refuse to make demands. As he writes:
The lesson here is that the truly subversive thing is not to insist on ‘infinite’ demands we know those in power cannot fulfil. The thing to do is, on the contrary, to bombard those in power with strategically well-selected, precise, finite demands, which can’t be met with the same excuse.
Gray is reviewing Zizek's latest tomes, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, out this year, and Living in the End Times, from 2011. Less than Nothing is not a slim volume at 1,038 pages. End Times is a mere 504 pages.
Gray's review takes Zizek seriously as it should and quotes liberally from his works. Here is one example:
The underlying premise of the present book is a simple one: the global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point. Its “four riders of the apocalypse” are comprised by the ecological crisis, the consequences of the biogenetic revolution, imbalances within the system itself (problems with intellectual property; forthcoming struggles over raw materials, food and water), and the explosive growth of social divisions and exclusions.
To which Gray's response is:
With its sweeping claims and magniloquent rhetoric, this passage is typical of much in Žižek’s work. What he describes as the premise of the book is simple only because it passes over historical facts. Reading it, no one would suspect that, putting aside the killings of many millions for ideological reasons, some of the last century’s worst ecological disasters—the destruction of nature in the former Soviet Union and the devastation of the countryside during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, for example—occurred in centrally planned economies. Ecological devastation is not a result only of the economic system that exists in much of the world at the present time; while it may be true that the prevailing version of capitalism is unsustainable in environmental terms, there is nothing in the history of the past century that suggests the environment will be better protected if a socialist system is installed.
Gray offers this summation:
Whether or not Marx’s vision of communism is “the inherent capitalist fantasy,” Žižek’s vision—which apart from rejecting earlier conceptions lacks any definite content—is well adapted to an economy based on the continuous production of novel commodities and experiences, each supposed to be different from any that has gone before. With the prevailing capitalist order aware that it is in trouble but unable to conceive of practicable alternatives, Žižek’s formless radicalism is ideally suited to a culture transfixed by the spectacle of its own fragility.
There is little effort in Gray to appreciate the intensity of the struggle Zizek engages in. It is the struggle of those on the left who have come to see that they have lost and that the injustices they experience and know to be wrong are either not seen as injustices or are accepted by the majority of the people. Zizek's turn to violence is born of frustration and passion, both of which need to be respected and understood, even if his tyrannical fantasies must be called out and rejected.
If you want to learn a bit about Zizek or see how to take someone down gracefully in the NYRB, read Gray's review. It is your weekend read.
-RB
Does the President Matter?
Does the President Matter? Consider this quotation from Jurek Martin in today's Financial times:
Barack Obama and Mitt Romney may speak, sometimes even to real audiences but more often to fat cat fundraisers, but their words fall on deaf ears if not empty wallets. Lots of people speak for them, in the strange languages known to advertising and political consultants, but what they say is ephemeral and leaves, beyond the daily news fix, “not a wrack behind”, as Shakespeare put it. Yet they are fueled by piles of money, which means they speak more and more – to lesser and lesser effect.
Lawrence Lessig is of course right to worry about the corrupting influence of money on our elections. But the greatest effect of all this money is the drowning out of meaningful speech in a throbbing sea of money-driven sound bites, consultant-approved platitudes, and poll-tested attacks. Everyone must stay on message, which means that no one says or does anything. In such a system, how can the President matter or make a difference in the world?
If you have an answer, enter our 2012 Thinking Challenge by answering the question: "How might the President Matter in the 21st Century?"
Learn more here.
Thinking through the Human Condition
Thinking through the Human Condition: Arendt and Anthropology
Answering Arendt’s Indictments of Social Science
My blog post today is the first of a series of contributions that aims to bring Arendt’s thought into conversation with cultural anthropology, my home discipline, and other modes of social analysis. At first glance, Arendt and anthropologists would seem to make for strange bedfellows, since their arguments have rarely intersected in any explicit way: Arendt engaged little if at all with cultural anthropology in her wide-ranging corpus, and anthropologists have tended to avoid Arendt, despite the inspiration they often take from other philosophers and political theorists. Nevertheless, the guiding premise behind this series is that Arendtian and anthropological analyses can be brought together in a manner that offers a great deal to wider contemplation of the human condition. This potential can only be realized, however, if we also recognize the frictions that emerge from their contrasting starting points and lines of argument.
Thomas Hirschhorn / Marcus Steinweg
Peter Baehr’s recent book, Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism, and the Social Sciences (2010), offers an enlightening vantage on these frictions and the difficulties they present for such an encounter. Indeed, Arendt regarded sociology and the other social science disciplines with the utmost skepticism. On the one hand, she took issue with what she regarded as their deterministic theories of historical causality and their misguided presumptions about human self-interest. As she contended in The Human Condition, the social sciences “[aimed] to reduce man as a whole, in all his activity, to the level of a conditioned and behaving animal” (p. 45). In so doing, they not only denied the existence of human freedom; they also reflected—and helped to perpetuate—the very mass societies they ostensibly explained. At the same time, the social sciences operated (in Arendt’s understanding) on the core assumption that “human conduct springs essentially from self-interested, instrumental, and utilitarian considerations” (Baehr, p. 14). This premise rendered the social sciences utterly incapable of coming to terms with the non- and even anti-utilitarian nature of totalitarianism.
Such shortcomings were only further compounded by social scientists’ reliance on established conceptual models and their penchant for historical analogy. In Arendt’s view, the social sciences were entirely too quick to cast specific social phenomena as reflexes or symptoms of underlying transhistorical processes (such as the materialist dialectic proposed by Marx). As a result, they were prone to untenable generalizations that occluded salient differences between distinct social and political forms (such as totalitarian concentration camps and institutions of slavery). In keeping with this complaint, Arendt harbored particular scorn for Weberian ideal types like charisma and bureaucracy, which she regarded as devices to “normalize” particular phenomena and make of them “an item or case of something already known” (Baehr, p. 26).
Arendt’s criticisms certainly apply to some forms of social science scholarship, particularly those that seize opportunistically on specific instances to engage in the kind of grand theorizing that bleaches human intercourse of particularity, emotion, and moral import. In such moments, complex human realities can and do become mere grist for the conceptual mill. Yet her dismissal of the social sciences ultimately strikes me as overdrawn. Many social scientists explore the conditions of human autonomy and historical novelty with greater nuance than she was prepared to admit. Moreover, many of them challenge the notion that human activity can only be explained in utilitarian terms. Cultural anthropology, in particular, has repeatedly highlighted how human beings arrange their lives in ways that defy scientific models of rationality.
Baehr remains a strong advocate of Arendt’s theorizing, but he also demonstrates the subtlety of social science analysis through three appreciative critics of her work in the 1940s and 1950s. The interdisciplinary scholar David Riesman, for example, found Arendt’s analysis of totalitarian society too sweeping: Arendt exaggerated the capacity of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes to rework human subjectivity, and ignored human beings’ stubborn ability to retain their individuality, exercise their agency, and otherwise elude total domination (Baehr, chapter 2, especially pp. 45-56). Riesman thereby drew worthwhile attention to the ways that Arendt, in her zeal to convey the pervasiveness of totalitarian power, neglected the sociology of everyday life.
The political sociologist Raymond Aron thoughtfully resisted Arendt’s notion that totalitarianism constituted a radical break with previous modes of rule. He related the emergence of totalitarianism to the existence of monopolistic political parties in Germany and the Soviet Union. He dissected the ways that totalitarian terror, especially in the Soviet Union, was legally codified and administratively routinized, rather than being entirely inscrutable and haphazard. And he insisted that totalitarian ideology was open to flexible application and transformation in a fashion that Arendt, with her focus on its uncompromising deductive rigidity, did not acknowledge (Baehr, chapter 3, especially pp. 77-87). On the basis of these specific claims, Aron contended that totalitarianism bore intelligible continuities with older modes of tyranny. As he did so, however, he admittedly shied away from the “mysterious margin” of nightmarish absurdity that he too observed in totalitarian regimes—and that Arendt traced so evocatively.
Finally, the sociologist Jules Monnerot sharply underscored the ways that totalitarian ideologies mobilized the fervor of their adherents through party gatherings, mass celebrations, and other ritual encounters. In the process, he likened totalitarianism to religious traditions (above all, Islam) in a fashion that resonated with other treatments of totalitarianism as a “secular” or “political religion” (Baehr, chapter 4, especially pp. 95-99). Arendt pointedly refused any such equation. In her account, religion provides limits and standards that protect the sacredness of human life; totalitarianism, by contrast, pursues the notion that “everything is possible and permitted,” and it regards particular human beings as superfluous and dispensable in its effort to transform human nature itself. Yet as Baehr notes, Arendt’s position did not resolve the question of totalitarianism’s (lack of) relationship with religion as decisively as she might have thought. In the end, it failed to take into account many witnesses’ quasi-religious experience of totalitarian performances, and it neglected the fact that religious forms and expressions did suffuse totalitarian discourse in demonstrable ways.
The point of Baehr’s book is not that we need to side either with Arendt or with her social science critics exclusively. I happen to find Riesman’s objections quite trenchant, but I also believe, like Baehr, that Aron’s confident diagnosis fails to grapple with the chaotic madness that characterized the Nazi and Stalinist regimes.
And as much as Arendt’s position on ritual and religion might be interrogated, her insistence that we maintain fine distinctions—and not succumb to easy generalizations and conflations—is a valuable one. One implication of this point is that we should be duly suspicious of any intellectual stance, including Arendt’s, which dismisses an entire realm of disciplinary inquiry root and branch. As Baehr’s book shows, rigorous social scientific scholarship can usefully probe the limits of Arendt’s assumptions, evidence, and arguments—just as it can lead us to a greater admiration of her insights.
-Jeff Jurgens
Georg Christophe Lichtenberg on Thinking
"Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together."
-Georg Christophe Lichtenberg
Why Think?
"What makes us think? Hegel's answer: Reconciliation. Reconciliation with what? With things as they are. But this we do constantly anyhow by establishing ourselves in the world. Why repeat it in thought?"
- Hannah Arendt's Denktagebuch, 782.
No relation is more central to Hannah Arendt's writing than that between acting and thinking. Thinking, Arendt knows, is distinct from action that takes place in the world. Thinking is a seeing into the unseeable and the unsayable. It is a relation with oneself in the two-in-one of a dialogue one has with oneself. In thinking, the thinker withdraws from the world. "In thinking," she writes in 1970, there is a partial "pulling of oneself back out of the world of appearances." Thinking, in other words, can be apolitical and unworldly. Thinking is even, she writes, analogous to death in its rejection of the world.
Against the un-worldliness of thinking, Arendt embraces the political humanism of action. In The Human Condition, Arendt names action as "the only activity that goes on directly between men" and "corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world." To act, she writes, is to live and "to be among men." Action is tied to human life just as thinking is, for Arendt, a metaphor for death.
The connection between action and human life, as well as the association of thinking with death, might suggest that Arendt prefers action to thought. And yet such a view would be at least misleading if not mistaken. Thinking, Arendt insists in The Human Condition, is the "highest and perhaps purest activity of which men are capable." Above all, she strives to bring thinking and action together; to think what we are doing. Arendt's entire life's work is a response to the thoughtlessness of our time that is the fundamental enabling condition of totalitarianism. There is, for Arendt, no more meaningful or powerful response to the dangers of totalitarianism than the pure activity of thinking.
What then is thinking? And why is it important? These are questions Arendt struggles with at all times, but nowhere more explicitly than in her Denktagebuch. In the passage quoted above, Arendt writes that Hegel answers the question: "Why Think?" with the idea of reconciliation.
For Hegel, reconciliation is experienced as a response to his fundamental experience of the world ripped asunder. In other words, the world appears to man as that which is foreign. Man stands against the objects and things of the world, which are separate from him. And man's dream and drive is to reunite himself with the world. In Hegel's words from his Encyclopedia:
"The highest and final aim of philosophic science is to bring about ... a reconciliation of the self-conscious reason with the reason which is in the world – in other words, with actuality.”
The aim of thinking, Hegel repeats,
"Is to divest the objective world that stands opposed to us of its strangeness, and to find ourselves at home in it: which means no more than to trace the objective world back to the notion – to our inmost self.”
What this means, Hegel writes in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, is that “the ultimate aim and business of philosophy is to reconcile thought or the Notion with reality.”
Arendt returns repeatedly to Hegel's idea of reconciliation. Perhaps no other thread of inquiry receives more attention in Arendt's Denktagebuch, which begins in 1950 with a seven page meditation on the political importance of reconciliation. In Between Past and Future, Arendt writes:
“The task of the mind is to understand what happened, and this understanding, according to Hegel, is man’s way of reconciling himself with reality; its actual end is to be at peace with the world.”
In Truth and Politics, Arendt again raises the problem of a thoughtful reconciliation to reality alongside a reference to Hegel:
"Who says what is always tells a story. To the extent that the teller of factual truth is also a storyteller, he brings about that ‘reconciliation with reality’ which Hegel, the philosopher of history par excellence, understood as the ultimate goal of all philosophical thought."
In Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, Melvyn A. Hill reports a further remark by Arendt, in which she says,
"I can very well live without doing anything. But I cannot live without trying at least to understand whatever happens. And this is somehow the same sense in which you know it from Hegel, namely where I think the central role is reconciliation--reconciliation of man as a thinking and reasonable being. This is what actually happens in the world."
In all these and in many other instances, Arendt affirms the centrality of reconciliation to her project. Thinking, as a kind of reconciliation with the world, is the activity in which human beings work to understand and comprehend the world around them. This understanding-reconciliation is necessary because without it we would not live in a world that we could understand or make our way in. Objects for which we have no understanding and no language to describe them are non-existent. There is a basic truth to Hegel's idealism; that the real world only is for humans insofar as we humans think about that world and reconcile ourselves to it.
At the same time, Arendt distinguishes her sense of reconciliation from that of Hegel. We humans are constantly and of necessity reconciling ourselves with reality. In living and acting, we establish ourselves in the world. We accept and conform to institutions, traditions, habits, and customs. We build a human world and then live in it, even if we at times resist that world or rebel against it. Both resistance and rebellion presume a prior reconciliation with and understanding of the world. This is what it means to be human and to act. In our everyday actions and life we enact our reconciliation to the world.
If reconciliation is almost unconscious and natural, why then, Arendt asks, do we have to repeat this reconciliation in thought? This is a question Arendt repeats often and in different ways. Her answer has much to do with her conviction that sometime in the early parts of the 20th century, philosophy and thinking ceased to be able "to perform the task assigned to it by Hegel and the philosophy of history, that is, to understand and grasp conceptually historical reality and the events that made the modern world what it is." For Arendt, somehow the "human mind had ceased, for some mysterious reasons, to function properly." In other words, what happens in the 20th century is that a gap emerges between reality and thinking.
This gap between thinking and reality itself, Arendt writes, is not new. It may be, she supposes, "coeval with the existence of man on earth." But for centuries and millennia, the gap was "bridged over by tradition." Human beings created gods, customs, and cultures that gave their lives meaning. The world made sense and human reason seemed to fit well to the realities that surrounded it.
The homelessness of the modern world, our undeterred will to truth, combined with our scientific insistence upon universal knowledge, means that we moderns can never be at home in a finite and mortal human world. It is in such a world that the drive for certainty risks perfecting itself into totalitarian ideology and the need for coherence threatens to elevate comforting lies over unsettling truths.
In our modern world where our thinking efforts to understand the real world forever fall short, reconciliation assumes a different and distinctly non-Hegelian sense. Reconciliation demands that we forego the will to absolute knowledge or scientific mastery of the world. We must, instead, reconcile ourselves to the reality of the gap between thinking and acting.
Thinking today requires “settling down in the gap between past and future;” in other words, thinking demands that we continually recommit ourselves to the loss of a knowable and hospitable world and, instead, commit ourselves to the struggle of thinking and acting in a world without banisters. Only if we think and reconcile ourselves to the reality of our irreconcilable world can we hope to resist the ever-present possibility of totalitarianism.
-Roger Berkowitz
Roberts’ Opinion—Taxation Will Set You Free
The Wall Street Journal, The New York times, and Guernica—it seems everyone is excoriating John Roberts' opinion upholding the health insurance mandate in the Affordable Care Act. The WSJ calls the precedent Roberts set "grim." The Journal, in another editorial, writes that Roberts' decision is "is far more dangerous, and far more political, even than it first appeared last week." Roberts has, the WSJ argues, substituted "one unconstitutional expansion of government power [the commerce clause] for another [the taxing power]," and, in doing so, rearranged "the constitutional architecture of the U.S. political system."
In Guernica, Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, argues that "Closer inspection of the actual written opinion shows Roberts gave those who want to hem in Congress’s power everything they wanted." Torres-Spelliscy agrees with the WSJ that, in her words, Roberts "provided the blueprint for a radical rebalancing of powers among the three branches." But while the WSJ thinks Roberts is expanding governmental power, Torres-Spelliscy argues he is radically constricting it.
What both sides in this debate get right is that Roberts' opinion is deeply important and that it will likely change the way that the U.S. Federal Government interacts with citizens. That said, for those concerned with freedom within a constitutional government, as was Hannah Arendt, Roberts' opinion offers much to be excited about. It deserves greater and more serious consideration than it has so far been given.
Roberts' opinion begins with an eminently sensible manifesto for judicial restraint. Like his hero Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Roberts believes the Court should defer to Congress except in those cases where the legislation cannot be squared with the Constitution. The devil is always in the details of such a squaring, but at a time of ideological posturing, Roberts' opinion is a welcome read:
Our permissive reading of [Congress' enumerated powers] is explained in part by a general reticence to invalidate the acts of the Nation's elected leaders. "Proper respect for a co-ordinate branch of the government" requires that we strike down an Act of Congress only if "the lack of constitutional authority to pass [the] act in question is clearly demonstrated." Members of this Court are vested with the authority to interpret the law; we possess neither the expertise nor the prerogative to make policy judgment. those decision are entrusted to our Nation's elected leaders, who can be thrown out of office if the people disagree with them. It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.
Whatever one thinks of Roberts' actual legal opinion, the statesmanship he evinces is welcome. In the most politically sensitive case since Bush v. Gore, Roberts defused a potential explosion threatening to undermine the Supreme Court's legitimacy. As the Arendt Center's Bard colleague Walter Russell Mead writes, "in form and execution this was a decision that will reinforce the Court’s position in the country while, so far as I can see, avoiding the possibility of harm based on the faulty constitutional theories that the health care law’s backers put forward." The introductory pages of the Roberts opinion offer a balanced and at times inspired primer in Constitutional interpretation and U.S. Constitutional history.
Beyond the near pitch-perfect tone, Roberts' opinion offers much to be thankful for. It is one of the most legally important opinion the Court has handed down in decades. It seems worth making a few points.
1. Many have derided Roberts for considering the mandate payment a tax when the legislation called it penalty. Let's give him credit for speaking frankly. It really was a tax. The Congress simply didn't want to call it a tax for political reasons. The mandate is a payment required to be made to the Treasury, collected by the IRS, with no Criminal or Social Stigma of wrongdoing attached to it. Roberts did not have to call it a tax, but he did so on the principle of judicial restraint, interpreting the statute in a way most likely to maintain its constitutionality. That is the role of a Supreme Court in a constitutional republic.
The distinction Roberts employs to call the mandate a tax makes total sense. He says that a payment is a penalty when non-payment is considered a wrong. If you speed and pay a ticket, you have committed a misdemeanor. That is a penalty, not a tax. But when the payment is simply made without any claim that the action generating the payment is wrong, that is a tax. So, if you purchase cigarettes or a speed boat, you pay a special tax. It is your choice.
In the case of the mandate, the Affordable Care Act says that if you don't purchase insurance, you pay a certain amount to the treasury. That amount is less than you would normally pay for insurance in many circumstances. Thus the legislation expects and imagines people for whom the payment is lower than purchasing insurance to actually pay the payment rather than purchase insurance. This is evidence for Roberts that there is no stigma associated with the payment and that it really is functioning as a tax rather than as a penalty. There is no sense of a wrong. Despite what Congress said for political purposes, Roberts is on good grounds to call the mandate payment a tax.
2. Roberts blazes a new path on which the federal government can continue to regulate the actions of citizens. The Congress must now increasingly justify its regulatory initiatives by appeal to the power to tax rather than the power to regulate commerce. While this may seem merely a semantic distinction, it is not a meaningless difference. And this is the heart of the real importance of Roberts' opinion.
If the mandate payment had been upheld under the commerce clause (as Justice Ginsburg's dissent advocated), then the government would have been permitted to do anything it wanted or needed to do in order to achieve its ends of creating a health care system. For example, Congress could have simply required people to purchase health care. You may think that is what Congress did. But according to Roberts, such a requirement is no longer constitutional. Instead, what the Congress did was say: "You have a choice. You can buy health insurance or you can forego buying health insurance and pay a tax to support the health insurance market."
What is the difference? Under the commerce clause, the government can tell you what to do (buy insurance) and it can punish you if you do not do so. Under the taxing power, all the government can do is require people to pay money into the treasury. This is not a meaningless difference.
While the power to tax can be terrible and the power to tax is also in certain cases the power to destroy, this is not usually the case. When taxes are reasonable and not destructive, an individual charged with buying insurance or paying a tax can always choose to pay the tax and not buy insurance.
This is the emancipatory thrust of Roberts' opinion. By shifting the Congressional authorization from Commerce to Taxation, he has struck a surprising balance between freedom and the government's power to influence behavior. On the one hand, it is now significantly harder to justify congressional authority over individuals that will compel them to act in a certain way. On the other hand, Congress can pursue its ends by taxation rather than by regulation.
3. To make it clear just what it is that Roberts allowed, he offers an example that I think is helpful.
Suppose Congress enacted a statute providing that every taxpayer who owns a house without energy efficient windows must pay $50 to the IRS. The amount due is adjusted based on factors such as taxable income and joint filing status, and is paid along with the taxpayer’s income tax return. Those whose income is below the filing threshold need not pay. The required payment is not called a “tax,” a “penalty,” or anything else. No one would doubt that this law imposed a tax, and was within Congress’s power to tax. That conclusion should not change simply because Congress used the word “penalty” to describe the payment. Interpreting such a law to be a tax would hardly “[i]mpos[e] a tax through judicial legislation.”
Roberts is right here. The real reason to like his opinion is that by shifting the authorization from commerce to taxation, Roberts affirms the federal government's right to influence behavior but weakens the federal government's authority to compel citizen behavior. His argument is that it is more consistent with federal limits and the protection of freedom to allow the government to tax us then to regulate us.
There are still many unanswered questions here. It is unclear how impactful Roberts opinion will be in the future. But he has offered an alternative to the ever-expanding use of the commerce power to justify intrusive federal regulations, while still asserting that the federal government does have the power to motivate and behavior through its power to tax.
It is rare to read a Supreme Court opinion that is as surprising as it is thoughtful. It is also worth doing so. Robert's opinion is your weekend read.
-RB
Gardenbrain
Is the economy like a garden that must be well tended by human hands? Or is it machine that, once turned on, runs mercilessly by itself? This is a question Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer ask in their NY Times Op-Ed piece, " The Machine and the Garden."
Liu will be speaking at the Hannah Arendt Center Fall Conference "Does the President Matter?" on September 21-22. He is the founder and CEO of Guiding Lights, a network of citizens working to create new ways to restore community, compassion, and active citizenship in our world. He is also a former speech writer and domestic policy analyst for President Bill Clinton. Along with Hannauer, Liu recently published The Gardens of Democracy: A New American Story of Citizenship, the Economy and the Role of Government.
In the NY Times today, Liu and Hannauer write:
In this new framework, which we call Gardenbrain, markets are not perfectly efficient but can be effective if well managed. Where Machinebrain posits that it’s every man for himself, Gardenbrain recognizes that we’re all better off when we’re all better off. Where Machinebrain treats radical inequality as purely the predictable result of unequally distributed talent and work ethic, Gardenbrain reveals it as equally the self-reinforcing and compounding result of unequally distributed opportunity.
American Criminal Justice, Made in Texas (Part 2)
In my last blog (June 20, 2012), I highlighted a few scholars’ recent efforts to situate current patterns of African American imprisonment within this country’s longer history of racial conflict and subjugation. More specifically, I focused on some of the central claims in Robert Perkinson’s book Texas Tough (2010), which offers a sharp account of the historical connections between racial hierarchy and mass imprisonment in the Lone Star State and the larger American South. In its broadest outlines, Perkinson’s book contends that incarceration in Texas has, from its very outset, been closely bound up with chattel slavery and its legacies.
This entanglement is perhaps most evident in the state’s long-standing commitment to forced inmate labor, much of which took place—as late as the 1970s—on state-run prison farms that bore a striking resemblance to antebellum plantations. It is also discernible in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century practice of “convict leasing,” which allowed private entrepreneurs to purchase the right to use inmate labor power from the state prison system.
Despite regulations that required the humane treatment of prisoners, convict leasing generated widespread neglect and abuse, and in the early twentieth century it drew the ire not only of many African Americans, but also of white labor leaders, radical farm organizers, and progressive middle-class reformers. This last group launched a concerted campaign to move the state prison system away from punitive revenue-bearing production and toward newer, ostensibly more benevolent forms of rehabilitation. In the second decade of the twentieth century, modernizers in the prison administration implemented a variety of reform measures, including better food and medical care, religious services and reading classes, ten-hour workdays, and even nominal compensation for prison workers (ten cents per diem). In Perkinson’s account, however, these efforts were undermined by vocal opposition from prison personnel and, perhaps counter-intuitively, a surge in inmate dissent and rebellion. This uptick in prisoner discontent in particular prompted administrators and lawmakers to reassert penal authority, and the prison system basically reverted to its former pattern of plantation agriculture and severe discipline.
To be sure, progressive reform campaigns reemerged in Texas in the late 1920s, the 1940s, and the 1950s. They commonly looked for inspiration to similar initiatives in New York (which represented the cutting edge of inmate participation in prison management) and California (which led the way in inmate counseling and the professionalization of prison staff). But they also responded to homegrown scandals, including a spate of self-mutilations among Texas prisoners in the 1940s. In a desperate effort to avoid and/or protest harsh work conditions, unsanitary housing, and guard mistreatment, hundreds of inmates chopped off digits or limbs, injected gasoline into their arms and legs, or severed their Achilles tendons. As Perkinson notes, similar tactics were common in the era of slavery and convict leasing, and prisoners’ recourse to such deliberate violence against the self ultimately drew a more sustained response from the state government than previous reform efforts.
Texas Prison Board, 1930's
Nevertheless, when a new system of prison management coalesced in the 1950s, it continued to emphasize “work and force” (Perkinson, p. 228) as the central pillars of incarceration, even as it embraced certain forms of rehabilitative programming like church services, formal schooling, vocational training, and after-work programs. This emerging style became known as the “control model,” and it garnered significant praise for Texas in the national press and in professional organizations like the American Correctional Association. As eventually became clear, however, the “control” that this model promoted ultimately rested on a culture of routine repression among prison guards as well as systemic reliance on convict enforcers, or “building tenders.” Since the late nineteenth century, building tenders in Texas prisons had dispensed disciplinary violence against fellow inmates with impunity, and they had enjoyed a variety of unsanctioned privileges, including the prerogative to engage in consensual and non-consensual sex with other prisoners.
In the face of such endemic brutality, a small number of convict activists began to draw on the 1871 Civil Rights Act to sue the state of Texas for violations of their constitutional rights. One of the most prominent activists, David Ruíz, filed a petition in June 1972 that offered a harrowing chronicle of his treatment at the hands of prison staff and building tenders, and a small team of lawyers and judges transformed it into a class action lawsuit, Ruiz v. Estelle, on behalf of the state’s entire inmate population. The presiding district judge ruled in 1980 that the Texas penal system had subjected prisoners to cruel and unusual punishment and deprived them of due process of law on a massive scale, and he ordered the state government to undertake sweeping changes. The Ruiz decision effectively ended Texas’s regime of plantation-style prison farming, and it represented the most comprehensive reform order that a federal court had issued to a state penal system up to that point. Drawing on the momentum created by the lawsuit, prison modernizers in the early 1980s lobbied for the redistribution of the state’s inmate population into smaller, less isolated facilities with understated security and extensive links to outside communities.
These reform efforts were (yet again) outweighed, however, by rising crimes rates, the ascendance of the New Right, and a concomitant turn toward “law-and-order” politics on both the state and national level. Texas’s prisoner population increased dramatically as both Republican and Democratic lawmakers passed stiffer sentencing guidelines and curtailed inmates’ eligibility for parole. These trends spurred a massive prison construction boom, but with the collapse of the control model following the Ruiz decision, the new facilities were increasingly structured less like plantations and more like warehouses that emphasized “confinement, separation, and complete architectural control” (Perkinson, p. 315). As violence against both prisoners and guards increased once more, Texas prisons resorted to extended “administrative segregation” (i.e., solitary confinement) and “super segregation” cell blocks in their efforts to contain not just disruptive inmates, but relatively compliant ones as well.
This recent punitive turn in criminal justice has not been restricted to Texas: rates of incarceration and prison construction have increased sharply in most states over the past three decades, as has the proportion of African American and Latino inmates. Meanwhile, the federal government—particularly under former Texas governor George W. Bush—has displayed a striking commitment to expanded law enforcement, extended sentencing, and more frequent recourse to capital punishment. In Perkinson’s analysis, then, the historical arc of American imprisonment has not bent toward the rehabilitative goals championed most forcefully in northern states like New York. Rather, “the northern prison became more southern rather than the other way around…. If northern prisons once gestured toward freedom and southern penal farms toward bondage, the whole Union is in alignment now, pointing back toward the eternal bifurcations of slavery” (Perkinson, pp. 362-363).
This provocative argument raises serious questions about America’s commitment to the granting of ostensibly inalienable rights to all its citizens, and it suggests that race continues to shape how we approach the protection and violation of human dignity. To be sure, there are moments when Perkinson’s claims overstep the limits of his evidence. I am not convinced that the recent proliferation of prisons in Texas and other parts of the South and wider U.S. can be read as a reaction to the end of Jim Crow and the successes of the civil rights movement. I also doubt that the second Bush administration’s conduct in Guantanamo, Afghanistan, and Iraq can be traced to the practices of southern slavery and imprisonment as neatly as he suggests. Nevertheless, the heart of Perkinson’s argument skillfully outlines disturbing historical linkages between slavery and incarceration without equating these two forms of domination. In the process, he implies that we may need to rethink the relationship that prisoners, especially prisoners of color, have maintained with American citizenship in both the past and present.
On some occasions, incarcerated people have not merely constituted a recognized exception to juridical norms, which nevertheless enjoys “some kind of human equality,” as Hannah Arendt described criminals in The Origins of Totalitarianism (p. 286). Rather, they have formed a social category whose claim to “retain [their] rights over [their] bodies” (p. 444) has been substantially limited by their exposure to forced labor, sexual degradation, and violence that often has not been subject to public scrutiny and political accountability. This point does not imply that prisoners’ experiences can therefore be conflated with those of slaves, stateless persons, or concentration camp inmates, to name only a few of the dominated groups that concerned Arendt in the Origins. But it does suggest that prisoners’ enjoyment of constitutional and human rights cannot be taken for granted, as she seems to presume. It is still an exaggeration, I think, to say that prison inmates live “outside the pale of the law” (p. 277) in Arendt’s understanding of that phrase. But I would also insist that, in all too many instances, they have resided closer to its margins than we may care to admit.
-Jeff Jurgens
Henri Bergson on Thinking
"Think like a man of action, and act like a man of thought."
-Henri Bergson
To Deliberate Upon the Public Affairs
“‘[T]he revolution was effected before the war commenced,’ not because of any specifically revolutionary or rebellious spirit but because the inhabitants of the colonies were ‘formed by law into corporations, or bodies politic,’ and possessed ‘the right to assemble … in their town halls, there to deliberate upon the public affairs."
—Hannah Arendt, quoting John Adams, in On Revolution
These remarks represent casual, back-of-the-envelope thoughts. The question they pose is: what would the Occupy movement, or something like it, have to look like in order to succeed in altering the structure of American governance? This assumes that the goal of Occupy is, or should be, to change the structure of American governance, and it assumes an idea of what “the structure of American governance” means, which I will try to explain. My answer to that question—what would Occupy have to look like—can be summed up in a few words: it would have to stop being a movement of the left. As a thought experiment, I propose to imagine an Occupy movement without leftism, and with the goal of changing the structure of governance.
The first thing to work out is wherein the leftism of Occupy actually consists. It does not consist in espousing the interests of the poor—or attacking the interests of the rich. Wealth is neither liberal nor conservative by nature, and wealth in today’s America flows alternately to Republicans and Democrats. Right-wing movements can be populist as well, and garner the support of the economically marginal. Wealth looks after its own interests and treats politics as secondary—which is why the catchphrase of the Occupy movement, “the 99 percent,” theoretically constitutes an appeal to both left and right. It is supposed to be a call to unite along economic rather than political lines. This—“Forget politics and unite for your common economic interest!”—is what I take to be the intended message of Occupy. Those who primarily hear this intended message thus think that Occupy is a new kind of populist movement, having left behind the identity politics of liberalism for a unifying, class-based cause.
Photo by Giles Clarke
But whatever you make of this intended message, there is also an effective message of Occupy, somewhat different from its intended one. The effective message of Occupy proceeds, inevitably, from the demographic composition of the movement. Is it plain for anyone beholding an Occupy rally to see that its membership is drawn from the educated, bourgeois, liberal left; that other contingents (sympathetic Ron Paulites, unionists, etc.) are essentially tokens; and that the members of the real economic underclass are present only on the other side of the fast food counter, selling burritos to hungry protestors. At a march I attended in Chicago, I could stand in one spot and see signs proclaiming dozens of demands: that we go green, withdraw from foreign wars, respect women and minorities, legalize gay marriage, realize that “we are one with the cosmos”—and, oh yes, punish the banks while we’re at it. I happen to agree, at least in some sense, with most of these demands (oneness with the cosmos being one that I would have to find out more about before deciding on), but I was puzzled by their presence. I asked myself: are these particular demands separable from the core economic message? It seems they ought to be, and in theory they are, but here the concrete trumps the theoretical. Get rid of all the people holding those “Regulate x” and “Legalize y” signs at the Occupy rally, and you will have gotten rid of most of the movement. Occupy pursues its universalism as a process of expansion from a preexisting social base. It is like a Facebook group that keeps adding members (in fact, it is that, literally). But this process has natural limits, which Occupy has probably already reached.
So Occupy has its economic message (“the 99 percent”), and it has its social message. The social message is: “Join the left! We liberals have everybody’s best interests at heart, and our concern is with economic justice for the 99 percent.
All you have to do to be part of our movement is to drop your uneducated prejudices—your racism, xenophobia, homophobia, chauvinism, et cetera. Then, once you have become educated liberals, we can move beyond liberalism and fight together for our economic interests!” In the very act of asserting its universalist economic agenda, Occupy reinscribes the particularist demands of the liberal left as prerequisites for participation.
Better than trying to cleanse the economic message of those distracting particularist agendas would be instead to think beyond the economic message itself. What would it mean for Occupy to think at the level of the political? The question of defining the political as such is a point that risks involving Arendt scholars, somewhat uncharacteristically, in long, subtle, almost scholastic discussions; but for our purposes, the answer is easy enough. It would mean to think about constitutions.
A constitution can be a written document embodying the “higher law of the land”—but it need not be. A constitution can just as well consist in an unwritten tradition (as in Great Britain), or, as Arendt reminds us, in an institution such as the Roman senate (or perhaps, in our day, the loya jirga)—a political body that lasts just as long as it is cared for and maintained. (Similarly, a written constitution lasts only as long as people choose to obey it.) A successful revolution—this is the thrust of Arendt’s On Revolution—is one which does not stop at the point of liberating people from oppression, which might be of an economic or a political kind. Occupy aims at economic liberation. A successful revolution, on the other hand, puts its main energy into constitution-making, and results in the creation of lasting institutions, bodies politic that function and endure.
Founding, constituting, instituting: this would be the business of a truly political and, I think, a truly successful Occupy movement. These activities are by nature genuinely public and open to all comers without prerequisite. They might take various concrete forms. Lawrence Lessig advocates holding mock constitutional conventions across the country, with the eventual aim of demonstrating the effectiveness of the process as carried out by ordinary citizens and encouraging state legislatures to invoke Article V of the U.S. constitution and call a new federal convention. Another model would be to simply begin holding unconditional open meetings, publicized and accessible to all, neighborhood by neighborhood, “to deliberate upon the public affairs” until some structure of governance begins to emerge, good leaders come forward, actions are taken. While both these models have their idealistic aspects, both have some realistic aspects as well. We have barely begun to think through the possibilities, but we will eventually need to do the patient work of reconstituting the republic.
-Stephen Haswell Todd
Vigilance in the Name of Freedom
The Arendt Center is on vacation this week. We will be back next week. Enjoy one of our more popular weekend reads from the archives.
I recently was sent the following quotation by Friedrich Hayek, the economist and political thinker.
Personally, I find that the most objectionable feature of the conservative attitude is its propensity to reject well-substantiated new knowledge because it dislikes some of the consequences which seem to follow from it – or, to put it bluntly, its obscurantism. I will not deny that scientists as much as others are given to fads and fashions and that we have much reason to be cautious in accepting the conclusions that they draw from their latest theories. But the reasons for our reluctance must themselves be rational and must be kept separate from our regret that the new theories upset our cherished beliefs. I can have little patience with those who oppose, for instance, the theory of evolution or what are called “mechanistic” explanations of the phenomena of life because of certain moral consequences which at first seem to follow from these theories, and still less with those who regard it as irrelevant or impious to ask certain questions at all. By refusing to face the facts, the conservative only weakens his own position. Frequently the conclusions which rationalist presumption draws from new scientific insights do not at all follow from them. But only by actively taking part in the elaboration of the consequences of new discoveries do we learn whether or not they fit into or prove to be dependent on factual assumptions shown to be incorrect, it would hardly be moral to defend them by refusing to acknowledge facts.
The quote is from an essay titled "Why I am Not a Conservative." Hayek is still today labeled a conservative (for whatever labels are worth). Here Hayek rejects the label, while also disdaining the modern conceptions of both liberalism and socialism. His efforts to stake out a position that defends freedom is as honest as it is relevant. It deserves to be read.
Hayek's quote is making the rounds not because of an interest in Hayek. Rather, the quote is being used (dare I say abused?) because it is thought to show the anti-science obscurantism and thoughtlessness of those who refuse to believe in evolution or global warming. The duplicitous refusal of politicians to even acknowledge the now undeniable scientific consensus about global warming is just the kind of obscurantism Hayek disdains. But it is a mistake to find in Hayek's attack common cause with efforts to enlist the government in the environmental cause.
Hayek's chief complaint with conservatism is its often uncritical defense of authority. The "main point" he takes issue with is the "characteristic complacency of the conservative toward the action of established authority and his prime concern that this authority be not weakened, rather than that its power be kept within bounds." In other words, the conservative is willing to put so much trust in authority and leadership that he tends to overlook those instances when government exceeds its authority and impinges on individual freedoms. This is why Hayek argues that conservatives are often closer to socialists than to liberals. Like socialists, conservatives are willing to excuse governmental action they agree with, even when such action impedes on liberty.
It should be clear that many who go by the name liberal today are not liberal in the sense Hayek means--which is closer to libertarian, although he also rejects that label and what it represents. His problem is with all those who would excuse government overreach for particular ends, when that regulation will restrict individual liberty.
Hayek's thought warns about the political dangers for freedom posed by both conservatism and socialism, two forms of increased respect for authority, one in the persona of a charismatic leader and the other in the rationality of bureaucracy and the welfare state. On both scores, Hayek's impassioned defense of freedom shares much with Hannah Arendt, although she undoubtedly disagrees with Hayek and liberalism's location of freedom in the private sphere.
For Arendt, liberal constitutional government is absolutely essential insofar as it is the best way to protect the realm of private liberty Hayek values so highly. For Arendt, however, it is not enough to protect freedom as a private citizen. Freedom includes not simply the right to do as one will in private, but also the right and the ability to act and speak in public. Freedom—human freedom—is more than the freedom simply to live well. Freedom also demands spaces of appearance, those institutionally protected realms where free citizens can engage in the debate and action about the dreams and hope of their life together. It is this freedom to be participate and act directly in government that is too frequently forgotten by those like Hayek.
That said, few thinkers better call us to vigilance in the cause of freedom. You can read the entirety of Hayek's "Why I am Not a Conservative" here.
-RB
The Cinematic Jew as Pariah – Lance Strate
For the Fourth of July week, we are on vacation. A series of new Quotes of the Week will be back beginning on July 9. For now, enjoy one of our favorite Quotes of the Week from the past year, a reflection on Arendt's reading of the Jewish Pariah Charlie Chaplin by Lance Strate.
"While lack of political sense and persistence in the obsolete system of making charity the basis of national unity have prevented the Jewish people from taking a positive part in the political life of our day, these very qualities, translated into dramatic forms, have inspired one of the most singular products of modern art—the films of Charlie Chaplin. In Chaplin the most unpopular people in the world inspired what was long the most popular of contemporary figures—not because he was a modern Merry Andrew, but because he represented the revival of a quality long thought to have been killed by a century of class conflict, namely, the entrancing charm of the little people."
-Hannah Arendt, "The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition" (1944)
The image of Charlie Chaplin's signature character, the Little Tramp, is an icon recognized throughout the world, one that remains powerful where those of his contemporaries, for example his partners in United Artists, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., have faded from popular consciousness. Moreover, Chaplin is widely recognized for his comedic brilliance, and beyond that, for his artistic genius as an actor, director and composer. Largely forgotten within the public mind, however, is the close association between Chaplin and Jewish identity, regarding both the actor and the character he portrayed. But to early 20th century audiences in the United States and Europe, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, the Little Tramp was recognized as a Jewish character type, a popular culture stereotype with origins in the 19th century, a by-product of the Industrial Revolution and (dare I say it?) modern times. Regarding himself, Chaplin never corrected misconceptions about his gentile ancestry, saying that to do so would "play directly into the hands of anti-Semites," while also taking pride in the fact that one of his great grandmothers was a Romani (aka Gypsy), and more generally he was outspoken in defense of all of the little people, the lower classes, the poor and the downtrodden. On the big screen, he was the Little Tramp, but in real life, as a human person and a champion of the humane and the humanistic, he was a giant.
Hannah Arendt identifies Chaplin's Little Tramp as something more than a Merry Andrew or clown, but as an example of a specific character type she refers to as the Jew as pariah. The term pariah is typically defined as outcast, which carries a more negative connotation than that of exile. Exile, in turn, is a status long associated with the Jewish people in particular, but today incorporated into the broader, and more neutral category of diaspora. As a wanderer, sojourner, or immigrant, the outcast becomes the outsider, the stranger, the foreigner, the alien, and also the barbarian (in ancient Greece, barbaros referred to anyone who was not Greek, not a citizen); in philosophical terms, the outcast is the other. The outcast is also the out-caste, the individual who is not a part of the existing social structure, who has no status or position, who is stateless or homeless, or jobless. The myth of the nation is one of blood ties, of an extended conception of kinship, of tribalism writ large. Against such cultural foundations, political reformation derived from Enlightenment rationality provided thin cover indeed. And it is in this context that the unique nature of the American experiment stands out, and I find it interesting at this juncture to juxtapose the words of another Jewish woman, one who was a native New Yorker of the 19th century:
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame,
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
This famous poem is "The New Colossus," written by Emma Lazarus in 1883, as part of a campaign to raise money to build a pedestal for the Statue of Liberty, and later added to the site of the monument (with the effect of permanently changing the meaning of the monument from its original intent as a political statement). Lazarus, a poetic protégé of Ralph Waldo Emerson, had awakened from her comfortable middle class youth to a profound social consciousness as she watched the influx of European immigrants to the twin cities of New York and Brooklyn, and in particular was moved by the arrival of vast numbers of European Jews seeking to escape the persecution and pogroms that accompanied their pariah status, becoming a proto-Zionist in her own right.
Arendt may well have viewed Lazarus as idealistic, perhaps even politically naïve, but of course it was in the United States that Arendt found a safe haven from Nazi persecution, and it was here that she made her home, just as it was the nation that welcomed Charlie Chaplin as an English immigrant, where he found opportunity for advancement and success, becoming a Hollywood star and also an entrepreneur, as a partner in the founding of the United Artists film company. This is not to deny the fact that Chaplin was also a victim of McCarthyism, finding himself exiled from the United States in 1952 on account of his politics, and settled in Switzerland, nor is it meant to discount the fact that Arendt was one of the lucky few to be permitted entry, whereas the vast majority of European Jews seeking to escape the Holocaust were not allowed to emigrate to the US. And there certainly is no denying the multitude of social ills that have existed and persisted in American society. But I would say that it is here in the United States that pariahs have come to find parity, and I would go so far as to say that this nation is truly exceptional in that regard.
But parity does not come easy. As Arendt describes the environment that the Little Tramp inhabits, "Chaplin's world is of the earth, grotesquely caricatured if you will, but nevertheless hard and real. It is a world from which neither nature nor art can provide escape and against whose slings and arrows the only armor is one's own wits or the kindness and humanity of causal acquaintances." But it is a world where the little people can outwit their opponents, where strangers can become friends, and outcasts can find love. Authority figures are intimidating, and need to be avoided, but at the same time Chaplin conveys, as Arendt puts it, "the time-honored Jewish truth that, other things being equal, the human ingenuity of a David can sometimes outmatch the animal strength of a Goliath." And in the American audience, Chaplin found that even Goliath's own people would root for David to beat the odds and overcome his more powerful opponent, because, as the saying goes, Americans love the underdog. The rejection of British sovereignty and the embrace of the principles of democracy and equality resulted in an American culture that is fundamentally anti-elitist, and sympathetic to outsiders, outcasts, and outlaws.
Arendt characterizes Chaplin's variation on the Jew as pariah character type as the suspect, meaning that he is always under suspicion, always presumed guilty by the authorities unless (and maybe even if) proven innocent. The presumption of guilt may well lead to the suspect being accused, arrested, convicted, and/or punished for crimes never committed. And even for authority figures who are willing to concede the possibility of error, we hear the rejoinder that this suspect must be guilty of something, even if it is not the particular crime in question. The stigma of collective guilt being assigned to the other, of scapegoating, is a familiar one, as is the experience of prejudice and profiling, as the role of pariah as suspect has been played by many people, by many peoples, over the years.
But across all of its manifestations, the pattern remains more or less the same. At times, however, it may expand into a paranoid strain of existence. Under extreme conditions, the police or military will consider all civilians to be suspect, and those in authority will consider all of their subordinates to be suspect. Under authoritarian systems, a culture of suspicion is established from the very top on down, and with the advent of the totalitarianism that Arendt so incisively analyzed, this culture of suspicion permeates every sector of society.
Arendt notes that whether guilty or innocent, for the suspect, the punishment is not commensurate with the crime, that the severity has more to do with the individual's social status than with the nature of the wrongdoing (and again, we are all too familiar with the social, economic, and racial divides that characterize prison populations). The fundamental injustice of society is demonstrated by this lack of proportion, and all the more so by the punishment of pariahs who are innocent of the crime in question, and perhaps innocent altogether. But this lack of justice cuts both ways, as the outcast is able to get away with breaking the law and flouting authority in situations where more established members of society cannot. The result is an odd, and for Chaplin often comic combination of fear, and impudence. This coupling of nervousness and nerve, according to Arendt, "is a worried, careworn impudence—the kind so familiar to generations of Jews, the effrontery of the poor 'little Yid' who does not recognize the class order of the world because he sees in it neither order nor justice for himself."
Writing in the dark times of the Second World War, Arendt ends her consideration of Chaplin on a pessimistic note, reflecting on the waning popularity of Chaplin's motion pictures, and especially the failure of his 1940 film, The Great Dictator, to achieve popular appeal and influence public opinion regarding the war in Europe. She pointed to economics and politics as the reason why Chaplin fell out of favor, but Arendt might have been better served by reflecting on the fact that Chaplin's success was based on the medium of the silent film, and arguably peaked with the release of The Gold Rush in 1925. The introduction of the talkies in 1927, with Al Jolson's cantorial performance in The Jazz Singer, made Chaplin's style of comedy obsolescent, and his resistance to the new medium, while commendable in regard to artistic integrity, defied the wildly popular fascination with the human voice. Chaplin's talent was such that he was capable of making the transition to the new format while maintaining the integrity of his Little Tramp character, as can be seen in his masterly work on his 1936 motion picture, Modern Times, which incorporates the speech of other characters, often heard remotely through speakers, and which ends with Chaplin himself singing a song comprised of nonsensical lyrics, thereby maintain his nonverbal presence.
The problem with The Great Dictator, where Chaplin plays a dual role as a parodic version of Hitler and a persecuted Jewish barber, is not that Chaplin speaks, or that he addresses the audience directly at the end of the film, but that he breaks the comedic frame of the film and preaches to the audience. However well intentioned his motives, however eloquent his speech, however much the audience may have agreed with his sentiment, his attempt to underline and drive home the implicit message of the film disrupted the medium of comedy, and undermined the effectiveness of the satire, a weapon far more potent than any direct, persuasive message could be. The audience did not turn away out of a lack of sympathy for the little people. Rather, it was Chaplin, in stepping out of his role as the Little Tramp, who abandoned his audience.
Chaplin's decline might be contrasted to the rise of another variation on the Jew as pariah in American film comedy, that of the Marx Brothers.
Harpo specifically portrayed a silent, Chaplinesque character, while Chico captured the stumbling, comic malapropisms of non-native, immigrant speech. But it was Groucho who introduced a new form of wit and fast-talking, linguistic dexterity, filled with puns, Yiddishisms, and a kind of brash impudence that reflected a newfound confidence and integration into society on the part of the pariah, from outcast now to working class, and later on to the insecure middle class neuroses of Woody Allen, and more recently perhaps to the defiant posture of Adam Sandler.
The fulfillment of the Zionist dream in 1948 signaled an end to exile for the Jewish people, but it might be argued that, for some within in the community of nations, pariah status was transferred to the State of Israel. In the United States, and elsewhere in the western world, the specific image of the Jew as pariah has become less and less familiar. And more generally, if we have not fully eliminated the status of pariah, of outcast, of the other from our culture, we certainly have witnessed enormous progress in social justice for all over the past half century, and have surely come closer to achieving that goal than ever before. If we still fall short of the ideals expressed by Emma Lazarus, the Mother of Exiles continues to hold her lamp up high to shed light against dark times.
And in light of the waning of the pariah as a character type, is Charlie Chaplin and the Little Tramp destined gradually to decline in popular relevance and fade from collective memory, fulfilling Arendt's pessimistic conclusion in 1944 that the little people now wanted a Superman character to identify with? I believe that she would be pleased with the alternative that I would like to suggest, that the comedy of the pariah represents what Joseph Meeker called the comedy of survival, a narrative in which the little person as protagonist seeks merely to get by in a hostile environment, to stay out of trouble, and hopefully achieve balance and harmony with one's surroundings. The comedic hero does not try to master or control the environment, for that would represent hubris, and ultimately result in tragedy, in bringing about one's own doom.
According to Meeker, tragedy as a narrative form is peculiar to western cultures, and I would add, invoking the media ecology of Marshall McLuhan, that it is closely associated with the literate mindset, one that favors individualism, and the separation of self from other and from the environment, and the expansion of the individual ego. In contrast, comedy, as a narrative mode, is common to all cultures, and from a media ecology perspective is associated with preliterate oral culture, and postliterate electronic culture.
In the comedic mode, what we see is an exercise in humility, in knowing your limitations and living within them. In other words, comedy reflects an ecological ethic, and more than that, an ecological mindset, one that is very much in keeping with the ecological concern of our electronic age, both in the environmentalist sense, but also more generally in the growing adoption of a systems view of the world. The ecological values of balance, harmony, and survival are values that Arendt would recognize as embodied by Charlie Chaplin's variation on the Jew as pariah. The Little Tramp with his "entrancing charm of the little people," may yet serve as an icon of New Age consciousness, post-civilization lifestyle, and a new, sustainable way of life.
Sign up for HAC News
Recent Comments
- Louis N. Proyect on Hannah Arendt – a film by Margarethe von Trotta.
- Hannah Arendt: The Movie « Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities | FentCiutat on Hannah Arendt: The Movie
- The Future of Higher Education | The Full Montbel on MOOCs: The Debate Continues
- Amor Mundi 5/12/13 « Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities on Arnold Gehlen on Arendt’s The Human Condition
- Shaun on The Courage to Do What is Right
Archives
- May 2013
- April 2013
- March 2013
- February 2013
- January 2013
- December 2012
- November 2012
- October 2012
- September 2012
- August 2012
- July 2012
- June 2012
- May 2012
- April 2012
- March 2012
- February 2012
- January 2012
- December 2011
- November 2011
- October 2011
- September 2011
- August 2011
- July 2011
- May 2011
- April 2011
- January 2011
- December 2010
- November 2010
- October 2010
- September 2010
- August 2010
- July 2010
- June 2010
- April 2010
Tags
Blogroll
- Black Octavo
- Daily Dish
- Fortnightly Review
- Hannah Arendt Center
- Hannah Arendt Center Multimedia at Vimeo
- Harpers
- NY Review of Books
- Praxis at Big Think
- The Contemporary Condition
- The Point
- The Relative Absolute
- Via Meadia
- Who's Afraid of Social Democracy?
- WordPress Blog
- WordPress Planet