Cecilia Sjöholm
The Art World and the World of Arendt
In New York of the 1960s, Hannah Arendt lived and worked amid an emerging scene of avant-garde art, literature, and performance. Although she demonstrated little interest in that scene in her writings, the politicization of art that it represented was in many ways matched by her own political ontology. Arendt’s occultation of the public sphere as well as her critique of capitalism, objectification, and commodification are features that can be used to elucidate the way modern and contemporary art was, and still is, conceived, produced, and shown. Although Arendt never formulated a philosophy of aesthetics, she evoked agency, freedom of action, and a sense of realness as qualities of the political and the aesthetic sphere alike. In this way, Arendt pointed to the way in which art intersects with politics beyond the frame of content, evoking the singularity of appearance as well the durability of the work of art as inalienable aspects of public life.
Arendt has described the political potency of appearances not only through the speech and action of living beings but also through works of art in the broad sense, with particular regards to literature.1 In The Life of the Mind, she makes clear that she finds the philosophic ignorance of art as scandalous as the ignorance of politics.2 Her phenomenological and political understanding of the “urge to appear” forwarded in The Life of the Mind challenges an understanding of aesthetics that relies on a specific category of objects.3 She points to the way in which appearances as well as actions are inherently political categories, creating new relations between time and space, subject and object, and perceiving and enacting. Her lectures on Kant’s Critique on Judgment may well reverse a traditional reading of the aesthetic implications of that work to political ones, but her concept of critique elaborated from that work remains applicable to art and aesthetics.4
To Arendt, plurality is not merely a gathering of individuals representing various points of view, or diversity in its most literal sense. Plurality is the very appearance of differentiation. It is the production of differentiation among agencies, perceptions, and perspectives that comes to the fore through action and speech. To plurality belongs also the capacity to imagine the world as different; therefore, plurality conditions the way we see things. The diversity of things and the variety of perspectives are all embedded in the make-up of a world. Only through plurality, when differentiation is continuously produced, can a world appear.5 The institution and safeguarding of the public sphere is essential to this. Arendt’s sometimes idealistic notion of public space as a sufficient condition for political life to realize itself does not address the social, economic, racial, and gendered exclusionary mechanisms that have followed in the path of its history.6 However, she points to the way in which open spaces, whether they are construed for political purposes or not, allow for political actions and forms of agencies to appear. It is not by chance therefore, that Arendt holds politics and theater to be similar. Both work with gestures and appearances, and create worlds of contestation and debate.7
The political implications of the potentiality of plurality have been widely commented upon.8 The aesthetic implications less so, but they are equally essential. Not only human appearances but also works of art are implicated in Arendt’s concept of world-making. Plurality to Arendt does not merely entail endless possibilities, although her concept of natality has sometimes been interpreted that way. In a world of plurality, my perception is always impinged on. Such an impinging does not occur through direct interference. Traces of actions, gestures, words, movements, and bodies of other people underlie our perceptions and experiences. Such traces, often mediated through the work of art, contribute to the make-up of the world. Works of art will present stories, perspectives, and values that are possible to repeat and communicate. The agency of the artwork cannot quite be equated to the political life of bios politikos, but they are not to be destroyed in the cyclical machine of animal laborans either. The ontological trademark of the work of art is its permanence, which in turn can be used to shield against the destruction of the public sphere by commercial, political, and social forces.
The Aesthetics of Arendt
Arendt did not strive to free art from institutionalized forms, but she contested its commodification and spoke for its inherent protection of the public sphere. Like representatives of the Frankfurt School such as Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, Arendt was deeply critical of industrial forms of art that appeared to be made for consumption. She regarded the disappearance of values such as permanence, freedom, and agency of a work of art as modes of destruction. The industrial approach to art and the capitalist ideology of consumption was, to Arendt, as ruinous to culture as the ravages of war. Art’s function is immediately put in relation to the public sphere in The Human Condition, and modernism’s flight into intimacy is explored as resistance against the degeneration of the public sphere in Men in Dark Times. In “The Crisis in Culture,” Arendt argues that art provides sustenance, specifically in the resistance against consumer society.9 This entails a critique against the kind of art that Arendt refers to as “kitsch,” art that is “rewritten, condensed, digested, reduced to kitsch in reproduction, or in preparation for the movies.”10 The result is a kind of destruction. Many artists survive the oblivion that may come with death, “but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say.”11 But this critique against kitsch and popular culture is not in itself a sign of conservative values. In fact, to Arendt, the hierarchization of taste inflicted by class society is as much a threat against culture as kitsch, and is one of the antagonisms that are brought into her reflections on actual works.
Overall, Arendt’s aesthetics comes across as modernist and potentially postmodernist; she not only celebrates the elliptic blueprint of Kafka’s stories but also makes the silence of Brecht into a form of expression. When art belies the sense of realness in a society governed by ideology, then silence may help erect the faith in the real. Her return to Proust’s novels in The Origins of Totalitarianism as well as her celebration of Charlie Chaplin in The Jew as Pariah can also be seen in this vein. Modernism, represented by these authors, gives proof of an aesthetic in which the antagonistic relation to bourgeois values is already integrated. William Faulkner, Karen Blixen, and Joseph Conrad weave the story of colonialism with shadows and flesh. All of these would have in common, at least for Arendt, if not a resistance to cultural norms then at least a mark of alterity. Rather than departing from a universalist frame of identity and ethics, they use the Jew, the homosexual, and the female heroine in a colonial context, and the flaneur as focal points of the narrative. The creation of marginalized characters helps resist the commodification of art. These are writers and artists that follow Arendt on her philosophical path, companions that not only illuminate but also add to and displace her philosophical arguments. Arendt speaks for a kind of modernism that negotiates the antagonism between consumerism and bourgeois ideals on the one hand, and the open spaces of the public sphere and the intimacy of the place of production and writing on the other.
The things that belong to our “inner life” and the life of the senses may prevail in the life of shadows. When they are de-individualized and de-privatized, they are transformed for show.12 Action, thought, and speech are transposed into books, music, and visual images. Through these transformations, art helps re-erect and relocate public space at the same time. Artworks and books imply the existence of a space that belongs to individual and private experiences, without being reduced to privacy.
In The Human Condition, Arendt makes it clear that the common sense is what brings the other senses together: “It is by virtue of common sense that the other sense perceptions are known to disclose reality and are not merely felt as irritations of our nerves or resistance sensations of our bodies.”13 This, in turn, is to account for the withering sense of unreality that comes with alienation and the meaningless cycle of animal laborans.14 The most important contribution of the work of art in a political sense, therefore, is its adding to the sense of realness. Realness, in Arendt, is a sense, and does not refer to a fact. Realness is an aesthetic quality of plurality, a sense prevailing as we perceive things in and through the perspectives of others.15 Aesthetic objects and phenomena, rather than being concerned with enjoyment, can contribute to a sense of realness, which unravels in and through the encroachment of our perception. This is a paradox: what we perceive as real is created in the imagination of the artist, and in Arendt’s examples are sketched in a manner that has nothing to do with realism. The sense of the real crosses the limits between what Plato would consider the difference between appearance and truth; it is neither appearance nor truth, but an interweaving of differences.
Art and Agency
A work of art represents a form of agency in at least three senses: through its maker, its mimicry of action, and its insertion in a political context. In the first sense, a work of art may unravel an answer to the question of “who” produced it. Every work of art reveals a maker in some way: the “who” that can only be understood as unique.16 In the second sense, Arendt lifts the case of ancient tragedy, claiming that the function of mimesis is to unravel not a story or a character, but specific agents. This is also why tragedy is a pivotal form of art to Arendt: it shows not so much a universal meaning of action but rather the singular “who” of the agent.17 Tragedy mimics the place of art in public space; as such, it is a mimesis of the singular event that emerges with action, unable to fully assess thought, the “other” that appears in the chorus. In the third and final sense, a work is agency through its occupying, safeguarding, or creating a place in the public sphere. The work is not simply to be regarded as a remnant from the world of manufacturing. Its unique quality lies in its direction toward public space through the very beginning. It calls for a space of politics, beyond its capitalist perversion. Arendt herself gives the example of art constituting communities of public space even in totalitarian regimes, in the Soviet Union, for instance.18 In these multiple forms, art represents agency.19 No object of art, therefore, can fully be reduced to a commodity.20 It is not simply a dead thing, or an object of decoration, available on a market. All art is turned toward the public sphere. The political impact of art is then less about the trajectory of modernity or emancipation of the subject. It must be seen in connection with concepts of the real and of freedom in the particular sense that Arendt gives to that concept: freedom not as a freedom of choice, but as a sphere distinct from the life in which we are shaped according to our professional or social roles, gender, nationality or ethnicity, and so forth.21 In this sense, the intertwinement between the political and the aesthetic is complete.
Notes
1 Consult Arendt’s writings on this topic gathered in Reflections on Literature and Culture, ed. Susannah Young-Ah Gottlieb (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007).
2 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, vol. 2: Willing (London: Secker & Warburg, 1978), 184.
3 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, vol. 1: Thinking (London: Secker & Warburg, 1978), 23.
4 Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 23.
5 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 57.
6 Rosalyn Deutsche is quoting Arendt in showing that plurality helps keep the “real” nature of the world. Evictions, Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 310.
7 Arendt, Human Condition, 187–90.
8 See, for instance, Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, ed. Bonnie Honig (Penn State: Penn State University Press, 1995), 316, and Dana Villa, Public Freedom (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 253.
9 Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture,” in Between Past and Future (New York: Viking, 1961), 210.
10 Ibid., 207.
11 Ibid., 208.
12 Arendt, Human Condition, 55; “The Crisis in Culture,” 216–18.
13 Arendt, Human Condition, 209.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid., 150.
16 Ibid., 186, 210.
17 Ibid., 187–88.
18 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harvest, 1979), xxxvi–xxxvii.
19 Arendt, Human Condition, 168.
20 As argued by Arjun Appadurai, commodities are primarily defined by their exchange value, and to be distinguished from products, objects and other things. See “Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 3–62.
21 Arendt, Human Condition, 30–31.