Chapter Four
Working Through and Out of the Straitjacket of Logic:
Arendt’s Politics of Natality and Memory
1. Introduction
“It has often been observed that the validity of the statement 2+2=4 is independent of the human condition” (Arendt 1994, 318).
“For there is a divine and, if I may express it, productive energy which cannot be made, but makes” (Augustine, (426 AD) 1998, 536).
“That there be a beginning, man was created before whom there was nobody” (Augustine (426 AD) 1998, 532).
Whereas Foucault’s considerations of the dangers of sovereignty lead me to a critique of liberal discourse, Arendt’s political philosophy provides an inquiry into the ontology of action and resistance. While Foucault’s notion of resistance elucidates the dynamic relations of power and resistance, I have contended that Foucault’s writings provide less of an understanding as to how resistance and power are produced. Arendt, through her concepts of action and natality, focuses on the origins of resistance and change. This chapter aims not only to elaborate on the concepts of natality and action, but also to delineate Arendt’s contributions to counterhegemonic egalitarian theory - a power/knowledge axis that works in resistance to the instrumental rationality that guides the Norplant® Condition.
I will first focus primarily on texts from Arendt’s “middle period” (The Human Condition, Between Past and Future, On Revolution), elucidating some of her key contributions to my critique of Norplant® and liberalism. From here, I work through divergent feminist readings of Arendt, focusing primarily on the work of Bonnie Honig and Seyla Benhabib. Before turning to a closer reading of her earlier and later periods, I confront Anne Norton’s valid account of Arendt’s racism. It is at this juncture that I work through her earlier and later writings (Rahel Varnhagen, The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Life of the Mind) with a focus on her critique of reason and her turn to “common sense.” By broadening my focus on Arendt, the Augustinian basis of natality and action elucidates her creative appropriation of Kant’s concept of sensus communis. I close the chapter with a consideration of the difficulties and potentialities associated with Arendtian politics and action.
But the reader may still be asking, why combine the works of Arendt and Foucault? Foucault and Arendt converge through their problematization of reason – and more specifically they converge on the tension between reason and freedom. The construction of reason as a normalizing phenomenon is construed as one of the central organizing principles in Foucault’s work. It is important to note that much of what concerned Foucault – the rise of disciplinary regimes, the role of normalization in constructing subjectivity – also was of grave concern for Arendt. True, it would be a mistake to map Arendt’s critique of the rise of the social directly onto Foucault’s ideas on normalization, power, and disciplinary regimes. There are obvious and less obvious differences - particularly in the field of the foundations and origins of subjectivity or for that matter Foucault’s focus on sexuality and Arendt’s on matters of democratic governance.
Foucault complicated matters by defining the methods and means through which power works to differentiate and articulate subjectivity. Individual uniqueness, that necessary condition for freedom in Arendt, is seen at times in Foucault’s work as a site of partitioning, of subjectifying a person, making her a subject. Yet, their critiques successfully complement one another. While Foucault offers a more incisive account of surveillance and power, he fails to adequately account for modes of resistance to that power. Arendt’s critique of reason when grouped with her concepts of natality and action provide grounding for articulating a novel understanding of resistance.
2. The Archimedean Point As Threat to Natality
Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition interrogates a modernist instrumental rationality that underlies both science and politics, taking as the point of departure the launching of the first earth-bound, man-made object into space. Such a venture enables one to conceive of world and human situations not from a particularized, local standpoint but from the Archimedean point. This vantage point, located outside the earth’s atmosphere, enables observers to view life as behavior and process rather than as action and activity. Like many other modernist theorists (particularly Weber), Arendt is concerned here with a sense of alienation and homogenization that pervades the modern human condition. Unlike Foucault, Arendt explicitly addresses in vitro fertilization or IVF and eugenics, drawing a connection between outer space exploration and these procedures:
It is the same desire to escape imprisonment to the earth that is manifest in the attempt to create life in the test tube, in the desire to mix “frozen germ plasm from people of demonstrated ability under the microscope to produce superior human beings” and to “alter their size, shape, and function” and the wish to escape the human condition (Arendt 1958, 2).
Arendt’s framework for addressing the issue of what we are doing is based in her notion of Vita Activa, which contains three categories of human activities: labor, work, and action. Labor is content of biological life itself - reproduction, growth, decay - all fall into this category. Work, for Arendt, is “unnatural” insofar as it does not pertain directly to human survival. It is the artifice that houses each human life. Worldliness is its human condition that is tied to the establishment of a certain durability in the world. Action is “the only activity that occurs directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world” (Arendt 1958, 65). Plurality is the condition for all political life as politics is the coming together of human differences.
While all three categories are rooted in natality, it is action that is most closely tied to natality. It is here that Arendt distinguishes herself from one of her primary influences, Martin Heidegger:
The new beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting. In this sense of initiative, an element of action, and therefore of natality, is inherent in all human activities. Moreover, since action is the political activity par excellence, natality, and not mortality, may be the central category of political, as distinguished from metaphysical thought (Arendt 1958, 9).
The emergence of reproductive technologies, which could interfere with the spontaneity of a new beginning, impedes the possibility inherent in plurality and in politics itself. The isolation of so-called “gay” genes and diagnosis of potentially “handicapped” children are but two contemporary examples of this process in that both may result in selective abortion. Here the specter and reality of negative eugenics compound the problematics of abortion further. Even in the midst of the hegemony of disciplinary and governmental mechanisms, Arendt provides a means of thinking through the creative construction of political communities by reflecting on the inherent unpredictability of natality.
Moreover, natality may provide an alternative construction of the notion of freedom, which Foucault finds so problematic in History of Sexuality, Volume I. Foucault writes against the freedom of the autonomous agent, identifying the means by which the agent’s “freedom” participates in a complex net of power relations. In an essay from Between Past and Future, “What is Freedom?” Arendt pursues the issue of freedom in corporeality and beginnings through her account of St. Augustine’s notion of initium:
In the birth of each man this initial beginning is reaffirmed, because in each instance something new comes into an already existing world which will continue to exist after each individual’s death. Because he is a beginning, man can begin; to be human and to be free are one and the same. God created man in order to introduce the world the faculty of beginning: freedom (Arendt, 1993: p. 167).
Freedom and action can and do occur in a world characterized by automatic process and global hegemony. Historical process itself can become as ineluctable as “nature,” but the “infinite improbability” of acting against naturalized processes is part and parcel of human action.
But can a political theory of democratic resistance be safely and securely built on the power of “infinite improbabilities” or miracles? In order to understand the context and the body of Arendt’s notion of natality, I turn to her dissertation, Love and Saint Augustine. In her dissertation, the philosophical roots of natality and the conditions of remembrance are elucidated:
The decisive fact determining man as a conscious, remembering being is birth or “natality,” that is, the fact that we have entered the world through birth…Gratitude for life having been given at all is the spring of remembrance, for a life is cherished even in misery… “Give thanks for wanting to be as you are that you may be delivered from an existence that you do not want. For you are willing to be and unwilling to be miserable.” (Augustine; “The Free Choice of the Will III, 6, 64). Unlike the desire for the “highest good,” this attachment does not depend on volition, strictly speaking. Rather, it is characteristic of the human condition as such (Arendt 1996, 51-52).
Remembrance is the tissue of foundation, a fundamental component in the construction of a political and social “we.” It is through remembrance that “we” exist. Moreover, it is through natality that remembrance exists. Moreover, it is in Love and Saint Augustine, not Between Past and Future that Arendt first devotes considerable attention to the role of temporality in the constitution of the subject. She writes:
Since our expectations and desires are prompted by what we remember and guided by a previous knowledge, it is memory and not expectation (for instance, the expectation of death as in Heidegger’s approach) that gives unity and wholeness to human existence. In making and holding present both past and future, that is, memory and expectation derived from it, is the present in which they coincide that determines human existence (Arendt 1996, 56).
Arendt’s thesis presents a possibility for the construction of viable political spaces, rooted not in “the highest good” or “volition as such” (that cult of the will took a dangerous turn across Europe in the coming years), but in the human condition that we are born. Moreover, Arendt’s thesis suggests a turn away from Heideggerian “expectation” and towards the centerpiece of remembrance.
Arendt’s theorization of natality, which is to say of human potential in the literal sense, originates in an anxiety over what is termed the rise of the social. Increased social bureaucratization and a subsequent depersonalization of human affairs characterize the rise of the social. Characterized by a “rule by no-body” and the transformation of communities into groups of jobholders, the social is primarily responsible for the drift of human action and distinctive speech from the public to the private realm. Yet, what is the social? In part, the social can be readily conceived as oikos, that realm of human necessity that dictated the private lives of Athenians. In this construction, the freedom of the polis, a free space where men could come into distinction was contingent upon a radical division between the public and private realm. The “housekeeping” work of the inner private world - which was usually relegated to women and slaves - enabled a true freedom of thought and speech to occur. But with the rise of the modern era, this “realm of necessity” was ejected outward into the public realm and subsequently politicized. Feminists, other activists and theorists have roundly criticized Arendt’s attempts to keep matters of human necessity out of political consideration. There are problems with Arendt’s accounts of privacy and the social. But, in order to get to those problems, it is first necessary to provide further explication of her political theory.
Arendt’s critique of the modern era focuses on the emergence of material abundance and the obliteration of more traditional social and political boundaries which held human development in check. The transformation of the objects of labor into consumable items and the overall victory of consumerism indicates the decline of the category of work performed by homo faber. Such a decline is matched by a “victory” by animal laborans - marked politically by an unreflective behaviorism and socially by “automatic functioning.” Permanence, stability, and durability wane under the sense of natural abundance and fertility produced by the industrial revolution. It is here that one sees traces of the increasing significance of the Archimedean point in that through this abundance humans begin to step outside the boundaries of their own perspectives.
For here we no longer use material as nature yields it to us, killing natural processes or interrupting or imitating them...Today we have begun to “create,” as it were that is, to unchain natural processes of our own which would never have happened without us, and instead of carefully surrounding the human artifice with defenses against nature’s elementary forces...we have channeled these forces, along with their elementary power, into the world itself...The result has been a veritable revolution in the concept of fabrication...the process of the conveyor belt and the assembly line (Arendt 1958, 148-149 emphasis added).
Technologies are appearing more and more as actual necessities or conditions of human existence, “so that the apparatuses we once handled freely begin to look as though they were ‘shells belonging to the human body as the shell belongs to the body of the turtle’”(Arendt, citing Werner Heisenberg 1958, 153). In this sense, technology ceases to have the qualities of being man-made - no longer something we make happen but something that happens upon us. In the context of contemporary reproductive technologies, Arendt’s observations bear particular relevance. Many reproductive technologies now channel natural forces into the world (e.g. human selection of genetic codes) along with their elementary power in that we know little, if anything, of the long term effects of such interventions upon the world, let alone humans.
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Arendt in both The Human Condition and “Understanding and Politics” attributes this key passage as being central to the concept of natality. Readers in search of Augustine’s quote may be cautioned that Arendt’s citation is incorrect. The key passage is at xii. 21 (“Of the impiety of those who assert that the souls which partake of supreme and true blessedness must nonetheless return again and again, in cycles of time, to labour and misery”), rather than xii. 20 (“Of ages of ages”). This is important to gain context for the quote, in Chapters 21 and 22 (“Of the creation of the one first man, and of the human race in him”). Chapter 22 introduces several key themes that Arendt worked from – including the concepts of novelty and solitude. This latter concept figured into her account of totalitarianism during her juxtaposition between loneliness and solitude. See in particular, the closing pages of her essay “On the nature of Totalitarianism.” (Arendt 1994).
Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason articulates the ways in which reason constructs madness. The self-reflecting, self-conscious subject knows himself. This foundational moment of the subject articulates also the other as out-of-reason, abnormal, not a subject. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception confronts the construction of the normal and the pathological through “rational spaces of disease” (1994a, 9) and more generally “classificatory thought” (ibid.). The Archaeology of Knowledge eventually broadens the analysis to a whole array of institutions, economies, legalities, and political relations connected and defined by discursive formations (1972, 179). The Order of Things: Archaeology of the Human Sciences comprehensively confronts the Age of Reason; the ascendance and decline of “man” in “our” era (1994b). I, Pierre Riviere, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother... returns to the issue of the construction of sanity and madness, with the barely implicit normative critique of the problematics of normalization within the medical-juridical complex (1982). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison presents a genealogical analysis of the institutionalization of reason – or as Weber might have it – of the birth of rationalization of the social realm (1979). The History of Sexuality Volumes I-III articulates the ways in which power, knowledge, and sexuality intersect to construct an artifice of normalized behaviors (1990a, 1990b, 1988). Again, I must add, the hardly understated critique of this process is that it is deeply problematic for Foucault. Power/Knowledge and Foucault’s other posthumously published essays do not display a deviation from this critique of reason as an ontological site of normalization – they only confirm it (1980). Christopher Norris, Jana Sawicki, Habermas, Benhabib, Honig, Osborne (to name a few) all focus on the function, role, and connections between reason, reasoning, rationalization, and rationality in Foucault at crucial moments. Moreover, for Foucault these concepts are often seen as sites of normalization, problematizing the multiplicity of human relations. Ironically, by some narratological twist, Foucault’s analysis of the rationalization of the socio-political realm through the age of reason is presented in modern academic discourse as separated by light years from the analyses of Arendt, Adorno, Horkheimer, and perhaps even Habermas – despite Habermas’ vociferous protests. The problem here is not that there is no divide between critical theory, poststructuralism and postmodernism, but that no thinker fits neatly into any category. What this chapter will show is not that Foucault was secretly a critical theorist or Arendt a postmodernist in disguise, but rather that both were secretly neither. In short, Arendt’s critique of the Archimedean point and the rise of the social is thoroughly rooted in a problematization of the view “from the outside.” In other words, Fish rightly pointed out the objectivist origins in critical theory – a perspective that was the centerpiece of Arendt’s criticism in her landmark text, The Human Condition (1958). Nor is Foucault’s relationship to postmodernism (or any of the “posts”) unrelated or disconnected to the very influences that surrounded Arendt – from Marx to Nietzsche to Heidegger. And, finally for now, the internal “politics” of postmodernism (i.e. the infamous separation of Foucault from Derrida) display Foucault’s attachment to a theoretical strain that I will argue, still hews to the vitality of critique – a perspective which is deeply connected to Arendt’s critique and rearticulation of human reason in the world.
Because the concept of “articulation” plays a prominent role in this chapter, it is important to present a more detailed definition of the term. Specifically, I use the word “articulate” with the works of Laclau and Mouffe, Grossberg, and Gramsci in mind. Laclau and Mouffe devote considerable attention to the concept (1985) as does Grossberg (1992) and Gramsci (1991). For Laclau and Mouffe, articulation is “any practice establishing a relation among elements such that their identity is modified as the result of an articulatory practice. The structured totality resulting from the articulatory practice, we will call discourse” (Laclau and Mouffe 1993, 105). While the first sentence of this definition is tautological, the second is particularly useful as the concept of articulation can be considered as the work of discursive regimes. This Foucauldian component to their argument (Laclau and Mouffe 1994, 105-114) is elaborated upon in Chapter Five. Put crudely, articulation is seen as the act of defining and “fixing” social meaning. Grossberg simplifies the concept considerably in the glossary to his text, noting that articulation is “the practice of linking together elements which have no necessary relation to each other; the theoretical and historical practice by which the particular structure of relationships which defines any society is made” (1992, 397). For the purposes of this work, articulation is power actively working through a specific framing of social meaning within a situation or field that could be framed or articulated in other ways.
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Perhaps Arendt has not gone far enough here in that the very process of observation, especially as it pertains to scientific gazes, is in itself rooted in a division between self and other, subject/object wherein the object of study is denied any fundamental subjectivity. In keeping with this notion, she writes “As a scientist recently put it, modern motorization would appear like a process of biological mutation in which human bodies gradually begin to be covered by shells of steel” (Arendt 1958, 322-323).
