Peter F. Cannavò
Though Hannah Arendt is hardly recognized as a theorist of place,1 The Human Condition and Between Past and Future 2 reveal her as such. A “place” is a physically, spatially distinct parcel of things, meanings, and relationships—human and nonhuman, social and ecological—defined by human beings and cohering with relative stability. People transform their surroundings—conceptually, physically, or both—into a map of delineated places in order to provide legibility, usefulness, meaning, and a sense of home and identity.3 Arendt does not explicitly identify “place” as a key concept. However, she shows how a stable, coherent geography and an enduring relationship with one’s physical surroundings, both built and natural, are critical in making the world a reliable, habitable human home.
Work and Action: Creating a Human Home on Earth
In The Human Condition, Arendt explores how conditions for human life on Earth foster three central activities: labor, work, and action. Labor attends to basic biological necessities4 and produces goods for consumption, but not lasting objects. Biological nature is characterized by relentless cycles of birth, growth, and decay, without clear beginnings or endings; nature consumes its own creations: “Life is a process that everywhere uses up durability, wears it down, makes it disappear.”5 Labor itself does not resist these cycles but participates in them.6 Yet human beings are in a “constant, unending fight against the processes of growth and decay”;7 to create enduring objects and culture, we must overcome mere biological existence through work and action.
Through work, we create enduring physical objects from pre-given plans or designs. Such objects resist natural decay and furnish a durable, built world—the “human artifice.”8 Work “instrumentalizes” the material world: “during the work process, everything is judged in terms of suitability and usefulness for the desired end, and for nothing else,” and “the end justifies the violence done to nature to win the material, as the wood justifies killing the tree and the table justifies destroying the wood.”9
Action is the activity of words and deeds transpiring directly among persons.10 Action reflects human plurality, as it involves interaction among diverse perspectives. Words and deeds constitute a shared, complex, and lasting social reality—“the ‘web’ of human relationships.”11 Each individual’s actions and life story both shape this web and are shaped by it.12 This web defines individuals’ and communities’ interactions, characters, purposes, and identities. Action is fundamentally political,13 and it finds quintessential expression in deliberation over collective principles and ends.14
Unlike labor, action is not tied to biological sustenance, and unlike work, it does not execute pre-given plans or subordinate itself to further ends. Instead, action initiates new beginnings, through speech and deeds, in the web of relationships. For Arendt, action is thus the realm of freedom.15 Such freedom has limits: one initiates action but cannot control its outcome. That outcome is determined collectively, as action reverberates through the web of relationships and engages with others’ words and deeds.16
Together, action and work resist nature’s impermanence and fashion the human artifice. Words and deeds accord meaning to work’s creations: “Without being talked about . . . the world would” be “a heap of unrelated things.”17 Work in turn fashions objects that embody and preserve the social reality generated by action.18 Action and work create lasting conditions for human beings to be “at home on earth.”19
Arendt’s emphasis on human plurality suggests that this home is not free of conflict, difference, uncertainty, or change. To be at home in the world is not to have a static, quiescent existence. Rather, to be at home is to find enough familiarity, stability, legibility, and meaning in the world to confidently undertake long-term ends and projects, and to fashion coherent, enduring individual and collective life-stories rather than constantly negotiate a hostile, destructive environment20 or simply labor within nature’s cycles.
Arendt’s Human Artifice as a World of Places
Arendt discusses the human artifice in spatial terms, implying that distinct, enduring places are essential to being at home in the world.21 The world created by work and action “relates and separates men at the same time.” It “gathers us together and yet prevents our falling over each other.”22 Social relationships are spatially arranged through things and places: “To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it.”23 This world is public, a collective creation and experience.24
Existing “between” individuals, the human artifice gives relationships spatial coherence and legibility.25 More than just a useful surface, Arendt’s aforementioned table is a shared place around which individuals orient themselves with respect to one another, perhaps through repeated meetings. The table and other things of the human artifice thus create, beyond our biological existence, a new set of conditions that shape human life.26 In fashioning and refashioning the human artifice, we fashion and refashion our individual and collective identities.
Arendt suggests that because nature consumes all of its creations, only the human artifice can sustain enduring places. Though Arendt overemphasizes nature’s destructiveness—natural geography and topography persist for thousands or millions of years—the natural world does not present us with stable, predefined locales. Elements of the landscape blend into one another; organisms and natural forces traverse and alter terrain and ecosystems. The natural landscape is in some measure ever in flux. In trying to make sense of their surroundings, human beings must pick out elements to designate and maintain as more or less coherent, enduring places. Stable places qua places are human constructs.27 People must therefore build a world and found places.28
Place-founding is most obvious with physical construction. Here, place-founding seems akin to work. However, the creation of places involves not only physical effort but also descriptive words, including identification of distinctive features and boundaries. Identification and description fall under Arendtian action. Recall that without action, we have Arendt’s “heap of unrelated things.”29 We cannot have recognized places without describing and delineating them.
By being described and named, places can be created entirely through action, without being physically changed through work. Thus “natural” place s are human constructs, founded through description. Even though the preexisting terrain has not been physically altered, it has been given meaning and boundaries as a place. To designate certain areas as wetlands, for example, we must decide on the general characteristics of wetlands and determine the locations and bounds of particular wetlands.30 Again, the physical terrain precedes our naming and describing it.31 Yet nature does not present neat boundaries or delineations. We must interpret and map the natural world.32 In doing so, we attach meaning to natural locales and arguably bring them into the human artifice. In Arendt’s terms, they transition from Earth to world, that is, from nature to the human artifice. Anne Chapman argues,
All natural, non-human-created things that can appear in public (i.e. be experienced by different people, from a plurality of perspectives) have the potential to be part of our world and we make them part of our world by paying attention to them.33
Arendt herself says, “Whatever touches or enters into a sustained relationship with human life immediately assumes the character of a condition of human existence.”34 Similarly, she maintains that individual animals or plants, when recognized or marked out as individuals, can become part of the world.35 Once part of the human artifice, we might maintain “natural” places against certain forms of change or disturbance.36
Importantly, any description of a place, built or natural, reflects a particular perspective and can thus be contested.37 As with Arendtian action more generally, the description, delineation, and naming of places is enacted in the web of human relationships and is subject to challenge and amendment by others, who approach the same locations through different perspectives, relationships, and positions of power.
Yet sharing a spatial environment—and at least agreeing that a recognizable set of places indeed exists—enables collective deliberation. Arendtian action and politics, as Dana Villa notes, “must be anchored in a shared world” that is the object of some minimum agreement. This does not entail a univocal perspective on the landscape, but some “palpable ‘in-between’ [i.e., a shared world] that makes plurality—a genuine diversity of perspectives on the same phenomenon—possible.”38
The Mutual Constitution of Identity and Place
In founding places and creating the human artifice, individuals and communities also fashion identities: “men, their ever-changing nature notwithstanding, can retrieve their sameness, that is, their identity, by being related to the same chair and the same table.”39 Arendt’s table creates a common location for those around it, a place that helps define not only their relationships but also their identities. Individuals interact with places through residence, work, play, politics, travel, shopping, worship, spiritual or aesthetic appreciation, and so on. These interactions shape biographies, goals, possibilities, constraints, relationships, routines, worldviews, and affiliations.40 And when things and places, like Arendt’s chair and table, are relatively stable, this helps stabilize human identities: “The things of the world,” Arendt says, “have the function of stabilizing human life.”41
Things and places stabilize different forms of identities, including unique individual identities, identities associated with societal roles, and identities involving membership in social and political communities. My kitchen table may help ground my identity as a particular person who reads the newspaper and eats there each day. The kitchen table may help ground my identity as a spouse and parent who gathers there each evening for dinner with his family. And it may help ground my identity as an Italian-American inhabitant of a small, industrial city in the twenty-first century, late capitalist United States who participates in certain food-related consumption and cultural practices and traditions, as well as in a variety of local, regional, and global exchanges and political interactions. Additionally, one might argue that as a site of food preparation and consumption, the kitchen table facilitates a specific set of ongoing relationships with the natural world—relationships that help constitute me as both a human being and a particular individual inhabiting the biosphere.
However, because different persons approach the same place through different perspectives and interactions, that very same place may shape and sustain a variety of different identities, whether in terms of persons, roles, or communities. Moreover, the stability of places and identities is never absolute; the human artifice stabilizes, but does not freeze, our existence. Places themselves change under social and ecological influences. As things and places change, they change those who interact with them. Over time, the world and its inhabitants constitute one another in an endless, open-ended process,42 just as Arendtian action is itself open-ended. Places and identities are always “unfinished.”43 Yet, even as some of its elements change, a place can still provide continuity for those interacting with it.
Arendt’s human artifice thus constitutes a shared spatial environment relating individuals’ multiple identities and perspectives. Place-founding happens in a web of human relationships. How an act of founding turns out depends upon others’ responses. Place-founding is a collective activity, requiring some collective assent. Fundamental disagreements over the meaning or boundaries of places can spiral into divisive conflict or violence.
Granted, one could despotically enforce agreement. Place-founding is frequently imposed by governments, planners, armies, developers, and corporations. Yet such place-founding does not qualify as action in the true Arendtian sense, but is more akin to work, whereby a powerful actor forcibly reshapes the world according to a pre-given plan.44 To be truer to action, place-founding should involve democratic deliberation, wherein parties offer competing conceptions of a place but seek a collective, ever-evolving vision.
The Preservation of Places
Places are always in flux, but the concept of place also entails some stability. In resisting nature’s cycles, human beings seek to create an enduring world and to ground their identities in such a world. Founding must be accompanied by preservation.45 Yet preservation does not simply follow founding.46 Rather, the relationship between the two is ongoing.
In The Human Condition, Arendt highlights preservation when she urges limits on the activity of work. Work, as noted earlier, instrumentalizes nature in a means-ends relationship; Arendt worries that such instrumentalism will escape from “limited and productive” bounds and commandeer our whole relationship with both earthly nature and the human artifice,47 ultimately endangering both realms. Anticipating environmentalist critiques of crude anthropocentrism,48 she warns of a “generalization of the fabrication experience in which usefulness and utility are established as the ultimate standards for life and the world of men,”49 resulting in a “limitless devaluation of everything given, [a] process of growing meaninglessness in which every end is transformed into a means.”50 As I note further, Arendt warns of a crisis in which not only work but also labor overstep their bounds.
The stability and integrity of the human artifice ultimately rests upon a stable, well-functioning biosphere.51 Moreover, as noted earlier, human beings bring the natural landscape into the human artifice. Care for the human artifice must include care for its more natural elements,52 including locations like rivers, mountains, forests, or wilderness. Arendtian place-founding is tempered by a preservationism that considers the ability of earthly nature as a whole, as well as individual “natural” and built places, to absorb change without being effaced or ruined.
Arendt suggests an ongoing balance between founding and preservation when discussing care and cultivation.53 In Between Past and Future, Arendt considers the Latin origins of the word culture. Culture “derives from colere—to cultivate, to take care, tend and preserve—and it relates primarily to the intercourse of man with nature in the sense of cultivating and tending nature until it becomes fit for human habitation. As such, it indicates an attitude of loving care and stands in sharp contrast to all efforts to subject nature to the domination of man.”54
One might say that care allows the original qualities of a place to endure and flourish and to provide a stable context, while cultivation enables new possibilities to unfold smoothly. Care allows continuity with the past that enables human life to be a coherent story, or narrative.55 Cultivation facilitates incremental change and adaptation. By contrast, domineering, aggressive action abruptly destroys and replaces the existing environment and thus erases context. In short, Arendt urges the “building, preserving, and caring for a world that can survive us and remain a place fit to live in for those who come after us”;56 transformation of nature through work must be tempered by an overall attitude of care. Here, one might speak of adaptive reuse of historical buildings rather than wholesale redevelopment, of community revitalization without gentrification, of energy developme nt through renewables, or of more sustainable forms of food production like local agriculture, organic farming, or permaculture.
But how does preservation relate to action? Action involves initiating, through words and deeds, a new, open-ended set of interactions in the web of human relationships. From this standpoint, action is characterized by founding—of places and other aspects of the world—while preservation seems to freeze action, for example through laws that accord permanent protected status to a place. One could arguably even class preservation with labor, in that it involves ongoing efforts to maintain the life of a place against decay or degradation, much as eating maintains the human body.
On the other hand, preservation is also pursued through public words and deeds in a more deliberative sense, as when activists affirm the ecological and cultural significance of a place and participate in debate over its protection. Admittedly, the end-result of such activism is often permanent preservation, which narrows the scope of Arendtian politics with regard to protected parcels of land. Yet this is not necessarily a problem for Arendtian politics or action, as deliberation may be ongoing at a larger scale, where debates and decisions over degrees of founding and preservation in particular places feed into larger, continuing discussions about the social and ecological character of, say, a metropolitan area or watershed.57 Moreover, an act of preservation does not persist automatically and without future action—an initial preservationist decision ultimately depends on whether it is validated through the deliberative action of succeeding generations.58 Clearly, like founding, preservation of places and of earthly nature is also a public, collective enterprise. The world is public, and its preservation happens in the web of human relationships.
In the end, though, preservation does restrain action. It limits the initiation of new ends, values, meanings, and their associated acts of change in the landscape. And as with an overemphasis on founding, an overemphasis on preservation is problematic. People dynamically interact with places, altering or refounding them in response to changing conditions. An overemphasis on preservation would radically curtail the freedom to initiate new beginnings that is the hallmark of Arendtian action. Human activity would be limited to carrying out a preordained plan of sustaining and reproducing the existing world. Nevertheless, ongoing attention to preservation enables the persistence of the world that makes action possible.59
Arendt’s Crisis of Place
In large part, The Human Condition concerns a generalized crisis of alienation from both Earth and world, that is, from nature and the human artifice. Villa calls this a crisis “of homelessness, a lack of place.” 60 Arendt, reflecting her concerns about rampant instrumentalization, partly blames this homelessness on utilitarian, consumerist values associated with modernity and capitalism. She indicts not just the pursuit of work without preservationist restraint but also the expansion of labor out of its proper realm and into a generalized ethos of consumption. Consumerism radically devalues our surroundings and the meanings accorded them by action, reducing both nature and the built world to “mere means”61 for transient satisfaction and then disposal. We come to “look upon . . . every tree as potential wood.”62 This situation threatens “permanence, stability, and durability.”63 It “harbors the grave danger that eventually no object of the world will be safe from consumption and annihilation through consumption.”64 Arendt thus notes that “if . . . we were truly nothing but members of a consumers’ society, we would no longer live in a world at all but simply be driven by a process in whose ever-recurring cycles things appear and disappear, manifest themselves and vanish.”65 She warns that we face the dissolution of a meaningful, enduring human artifice. The result is a world that “has lost its power to gather [individuals] together, to relate and to separate them,”66 in which individuals are “deprived of an ‘objective’ relationship with them [i.e., one another] that comes from being related to and separated from them through the intermediary of a common world of things.”67
From an environmental standpoint, Arendt was quite prescient. Over a decade before the rise of modern environmentalism, she warned that a consumption-oriented economy was instrumentalizing and devouring the natural and built worlds. Today, readers can draw on Arendt to better appreciate the deep social impacts of land use issues like unregulated development, suburban sprawl, energy development, and the construction of pipelines through indigenous and other communities.
Notes
1 For exceptions, see the essay from which this chapter is adapted: Peter F. Cannavò, “Hannah Arendt: Place, World, and Earthly Nature,” in Engaging Nature: Environmentalism, Concepts of Nature, and the Study of the Political Theory Canon, ed. Peter F. Cannavò and Joseph H. Lane, Jr. (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014, 253–69). See also Anne Chapman, “The Ways That Nature Matters: The World and the Earth in the Thought of Hannah Arendt,” Environmental Values 16, no. 4 (November 2007): 433–45; David Macauley, “Out of Place and Outer Space: Hannah Arendt and Earth Alienation: An Historical and Critical Perspective,” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 3, no. 4 (1992): 19–45; Daniel Kemmis, Community and the Politics of Place (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1990); Paul Ott, “World and Earth: Hannah Arendt and the Human Relationship to Nature,” Ethics, Place & Environment 12, no. 1 (2009): 1–16; and Kenneth Frampton, “The Status of Man and the Status of His Objects: A Reading of The Human Condition,” in Modern Architecture and the Critical Present, ed. Kenneth Frampton (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982), 6–19. Dana Villa acknowledges Arendt as a critic of placelessness. See Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 171. Other writers have explored the environmental implications of Arendt’s thought. See Kerry H. Whiteside, “Hannah Arendt and Ecological Politics,” Environmental Ethics 16, no. 4 (Winter 1994): 339–58, and “Worldliness and Respect for Nature: An Ecological Application of Hannah Arendt’s Conception of Culture,” Environmental Values 7, no. 1 (February 1998): 25–40. Whiteside’s work is relevant to Arendt’s views on place. Douglas Torgerson draws on Arendt’s conception of action and political deliberation to model what he calls a “green public sphere.” See Torgerson, The Promise of Green Politics: Environmentalism and the Public Sphere (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). But I am especially indebted to Macauley, “Out of Place,” for inspiring the ideas discussed in this chapter.
2 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), and Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin Books, 1977).
3 See Peter F. Cannavò, The Working Landscape: Founding, Preservation, and the Politics of Place (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2007), esp. 20.
4 Arendt, The Human Condition, 118–26.
5 Ibid., 96.
6 Ibid., 7–8, 79–93.
7 Ibid., 100.
8 Ibid., 136.
9 Ibid., 153–54, 156.
10 Ibid., 7.
11 Ibid., 183.
12 Ibid., 184.
13 Ibid., 22–28, 196–98.
14 See also Villa, Arendt and Heidegger, 32–33.
15 Arendt, Human Condition, 177.
16 Ibid., 183–84, 191–92, 232–34.
17 Ibid., 204.
18 Ibid., 95. See also Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996), 108.
19 Ibid., 134.
20 Cannavò, Working Landscape, 6.
21 See also Whiteside, “Hannah Arendt,” 353; Frampton, “Status of Man.”
22 Arendt, Human Condition, 52–53.
23 Ibid., 52-53; emphasis added.
24 Chapman, “The Ways That Nature Matters,” 435.
25 Hanna Fenichel Pitkin says, “This world of things in which we have interest is a tangible in-between (inter-esse).” See Pitkin, “Justice: On Relating Private and Public,” Political Theory 9 (1981): 327–352, 342.
26 Arendt, Human Condition, 9.
27 Martin Heidegger makes a similar point. See “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1977), 343–63. See also see Chapman, “The Ways That Nature Matters.”
28 On the founding and preservation of places, see Cannavò, Working Landscape.
29 Arendt, Human Condition, 204.
30 For a similar point, see Robert David Sack, Homo Geographicus: A Framework for Action, Awareness, and Moral Concern (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 66, 80.
31 And on the creation of places by nonhuman animals, see Mick Smith’s review of Cannavò, Working Landscape, in Environmental Ethics 31, no. 1 (2009): 97–100.
32 Though Macauley notes that Arendt overlooks how particular locales in nature, such as forests or rivers, already have a certain structure or coherence. See Macauley, “Out of Place,” 44.
33 Chapman, “The Ways That Nature Matters,” 437.
34 Arendt, Human Condition, 9.
35 Ibid., 98.
36 The management of wilderness areas against natural or anthropogenic change is of course paradoxical. See Roderick Frazier Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 4th ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 341.
37 See also David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 309–10, 316, 322.
38 Villa, Arendt and Heidegger, 34.
39 Arendt, Human Condition, 137.
40 See also Cannavò, Working Landscape, 33, and Allan Pred, “Place as Historically Contingent Process: Structuration and the Time-Geography of Becoming Places,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 74 (1984): 279–97.
41 Arendt, Human Condition, 137.
42 See Sack, Homo Geographicus, 2, 34.
43 Doreen Massey, “Spaces of Politics,” in Human Geography Today, ed. Doreen Massey, John Allen, and Philip Sarre (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), 279–294.
44 Arendt, Human Condition, 220–30.
45 Cannavò, Working Landscape, 41; Chapman, “The Ways That Nature Matters,” 435–36.
46 On the interaction between founding and preservation, see also Iris Marion Young, Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy, and Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 134–64.
47 Arendt, Human Condition, 157.
48 See also Whiteside, “Hannah Arendt” and “Worldliness.”
49 Arendt, Human Condition, 157.
50 Ibid.
51 Chapman, “The Ways That Nature Matters,” 437–38.
52 See Whiteside, “Worldliness.”
53 This paragraph draws on Whiteside, “Worldliness,” and Cannavò, Working Landscape, 44.
54 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 211–12.
55 See also Young, Intersecting Voices, 153.
56 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 95.
57 On preservationist discourse as action, see also Ott, “World and Earth,” 16.
58 I am indebted to Scott Cameron for this insight.
59 See also Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 118.
60 Villa, Arendt and Heidegger, 171. Macauley says that for Arendt, Earth and world alienation mean “a loss of roots and a common, shared sense of place, a realm of meaningful pursuits secured by tradition against the forces of change.” Macauley, “Out of Place,” 25.
61 Arendt, Human Condition, 156.
62 Ibid., 158.
63 Ibid., 125–26.
64 Ibid., 133.
65 Ibid., 132–34.
66 Ibid., 52–53.
67 Ibid., 58.