Doing Aesthetics with Arendt: How to See Things

DOING AESTHETICS WITH ARENDT

COLUMBIA THEMES IN PHILOSOPHY, SOCIAL CRITICISM, AND THE ARTS

COLUMBIA THEMES IN PHILOSOPHY, SOCIAL CRITICISM, AND THE ARTS

LYDIA GOEHR AND GREGG M. HOROWITZ, EDITORS

Advisory Board

Carolyn Abbate

J. M. Bernstein

Eve Blau

T. J. Clark

Arthur C. Danto

John Hyman

Michael Kelly

Paul Kottman

Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts presents monographs, essay collections, and short books on philosophy and aesthetic theory. It aims to publish books that show the ability of the arts to stimulate critical reflection on modern and contemporary social, political, and cultural life. Art is not now, if it ever was, a realm of human activity independent of the complex realities of social organization and change, political authority and antagonism, cultural domination and resistance. The possibilities of critical thought embedded in the arts are most fruitfully expressed when addressed to readers across the various fields of social and humanistic inquiry. The idea of philosophy in the series title ought to be understood, therefore, to embrace forms of discussion that begin where mere academic expertise exhausts itself; where the rules of social, political, and cultural practice are both affirmed and challenged; and where new thinking takes place. The series does not privilege any particular art, nor does it ask for the arts to be mutually isolated. The series encourages writing from the many fields of thoughtful and critical inquiry.

For the list of titles in this series see Series List.

DOING AESTHETICS WITH ARENDT

HOW TO SEE THINGS

CECILIA SJӦHOLM

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS    NEW YORK

Columbia University Press

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Copyright © 2015 Columbia University Press

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E-ISBN 978-0-231-53990-6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sjöholm, Cecilia.

Doing aesthetics with Arendt: how to see things / Cecilia Sjoholm.

    pages cm.—(Columbia themes in philosophy, social criticism, and the arts)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-17308-7 (cloth : acid-free paper)—ISBN 978-0-231-53990-6 (e-book)

  1. Arendt, Hannah, 1906–1975. 2. Aesthetics. 3. Art—Philosophy. I. Title.

B945.A694S56 2015

111′.85092—dc23

2015001341

A Columbia University Press E-book.

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Cover and book design: Lisa Hamm

Cover image: 1969. © AP Photo

References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

FOR MÅRTEN, HOA, AND THU

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

1   SENSING SPACE: ART AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE

2   THE WORK OF ART

3   THE ENCROACHMENT OF OTHERS

4   TENSIONS OF LAW: TRAGEDY AND THE VISIBILITY OF LIVES

5   COMEDY IN THE DARK: ARENDT, CHAPLIN, AND ANTI-SEMITISM

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

INTRODUCTION

THINGS CAN be seen in a number of ways. Things, not only things in the material sense of objects but also things—that is, problems, concepts, and phenomena—can be scrutinized from a variety of positions and perspectives. The title of this book refers to an aesthetics after Hannah Arendt. She never wrote on aesthetics. But she engaged in problems of art and aesthetic theory—reflecting on sensibility, judgment, and works of art in a manner that is both radical and consistent.

The purpose of Doing Aesthetics with Arendt: How to See Things is double: first, to trace a coherent line in Arendt’s considerations of art and aesthetics in and through the scattered remarks on aesthetic experience and works of art in her published works, notes, and letters, and second, to make her thoughts relevant for us today. This includes a reflection on how her aesthetics may inform and alter our attitude toward philosophical questioning, for instance, on the political, agency, freedom, the law, prejudice, and so on. Together, these purposes form an overall question: If Arendt had produced an aesthetic theory, what would it have looked like? The question is inspired by Arendt herself. She knew well that Kant’s Critique of Judgment was not a book on politics, yet she decided to read it as Kant’s unfinished politics. I have made use of that gesture. I know well that Arendt’s reading of Kant was not an aesthetics. Yet I have decided to read it as an unfinished aesthetic theory. Such a reading may appear idiosyncratic. But it follows suggestions present in Arendt’s own work.

The research on Arendt’s work is extensive, particularly in the field of political and social philosophy. There is less written on Arendt and aesthetics, and a comprehensive study on this issue is lacking altogether. Attention has been given to Arendt and literature, which focuses on her correspondence with authors (e.g., Benjamin, Broch, Johnson, and McCarthy).¹ Arendt’s importance for the arts has been noticed with regard to her notion of public space.² The role of the spectator has been considered, in particular in relation to Greek drama.³ Arendt’s aesthetic interests have been noted in the field of political philosophy,⁴ not least with regard to judgment⁵ and the role of political imagination.⁶ However, Arendt’s interest in the senses and aesthetic sensibility is underresearched, not least with regard to their prepolitical implications; her political ontology rests on a notion of plurality that cannot be conceived in the abstract. The political is seen, heard, felt, and apprehended through a sensible form of being, producing judgment and imagination as functions of sensibility. Aesthetic sensibility, therefore, underlies all forms of political reflection, producing possibilities as well as constraints. The role of the work of art for Arendt’s ideas has also been neglected, although it may contribute not only to Arendt scholarship but also to theories of art in general and to political philosophy. These are the main contributions to what we may construe as an Arendtian aesthetics.

Where, one might ask, is the work of art in her writings? Disregarding a few paragraphs on Homo faber in The Human Condition, all in all there is very little description of visual objects in Arendt’s work. Questions of aesthetics, however, cannot be reduced to art. We experience aesthetic phenomena in our everyday lives, in nature, in the sciences, and so on. Following Kant, we may talk about all those phenomena that appeal to our judgment as belonging to the field of aesthetic inquiry. Judgment intrinsically belongs to the field of aesthetics. We experience aesthetic phenomena as beautiful, ugly, pleasurable, or sublime. It is certain that works of art offer good examples of how to frame aesthetic inquiries.

Arendt was an avid reader, and she discusses literature with great enthusiasm. She mentions other forms of art less often. It would appear, then, as if she has nothing to say about visual art, cinema, or music. As one reads her reflections on art and aesthetics, however, it becomes clear that, for her, any kind of categorization of forms of art and any kind of specificity that one may want to give to various forms of aesthetic experience are less interesting than their common features. Arendt’s aesthetics has wider significance than an exploration of works of a certain medium. She is concerned with the way in which aesthetics teaches us how to see things—not in terms of holding an opinion but rather in terms of how we become concerned and engaged with the world.

We have become so used to considering Arendt as a political thinker that we have forgotten the aesthetic aspects of her philosophy. We also have become so used to reading her lectures on Kant through a political lens that we have forgotten their aesthetic implications. Going through her notebooks, however, we find reflections on aesthetics and sensibility that were never fully elaborated in her published work. There is an aesthetics hidden in Arendt’s writings. It can be seen in conjunction with the phenomenology of thought in The Life of the Mind. Heterogeneous and differentiated, thought takes on a multiplicity of forms and functions—one of which is that of art. In lecture notes, notebooks, and letters, and in The Life of the Mind, Arendt elaborates the question of appearance in conjunction with aesthetic sensibility, exploring the sentient aspects of plurality and the contextual nature of human perception.

There are four features in her general inquiries into the particular nature of art and aesthetics that stand out. They are produced out of certain presumptions, which have to do with an ontology of plurality and a valorization of all human activity with regard to plurality. The first general feature has to do with a way of appearing: the most distinctive feature of art is that it belongs to public space. Works of art do not appear as isolated phenomena; they are inserted in a great variety of appearances. Second, the work of art is characterized through a quality of permanence. Art conditions human life through simple endurance—it precedes and follows singular generations. Permanence also lends it a quality of resistance against capitalist forces of commodification. Third, action is conditioned by a quality in our sensible apprehension of the world that we talk about in terms of realness. Art, in general, does not appear as real but contributes to judgment of what is. Narrative helps weave the web that we experience as real. The weight given to narrative stands out along with the capacity to weave a world. Narrative cannot be dissociated from aesthetic sensibility; it structures perception. Fourth, the question is not what art is but what it does. Art holds an important symbolic position intrinsically intertwined with agency. In The Life of the Mind, Arendt’s critique of Heidegger’s philosophy of Being makes a point of this: Heidegger is not only being uninterested in action; he fails to account for creativity and art. But art’s agency is conceived in alternate ways. There is a tension between the way the work of art is considered in The Human Condition and in articles such as The Crisis in Culture and Culture and Politics and the comments in her lesser known notebooks, which read more with The Life of the Mind, her last published great work. In the earlier published works, the question of art is an auxiliary to the theory of action.

The first chapter of this book expounds on the first dimension of Arendt’s aesthetics, what it means that art belongs to public space. The stress on public space offers a challenge to the metaphysical tradition of aesthetics in that it brackets the question of Being, focusing entirely on appearance. Plurality does not merely imply that things can be seen in a number of ways in the sense that it advocates a kind of anthropological perspectivism. Plurality has ontological status, and the theory of sense-perception derives from that ontology, undoing the need to identify viewpoints from particular subjects, however different they may be. Things appear because the manifold is given—this means that any attack on the manifold is an attack on perception. What Arendt calls the public sphere is a fundament to appearances of aesthetic as well as political significance. The public sphere manifests freedom as a function of plurality. The possibilities of public space also were explored in the avant-garde art of the 1960s and 1970s, a fact that made Arendt’s aesthetics resonate with the contemporary art scene, though perhaps unwittingly.

The second dimension of an Arendtian aesthetics, the power of an object of art to remain, will be discussed in the second chapter. Works of art coexist with human life. When objects are ruined, so are the lives of people. This is a totalitarian and colonial move; totalitarianism as well as colonialism targeted not only human expressions of culture but also aesthetic and cultural objects. Arendt took an active part in attempting to restore the cultural treasures of the German Jewish communities after the war. The experience made it quite clear that the extinction of cultural objects is intrinsically linked to the persecution of a people. Through this fact, we must learn to understand how cultural objects and artifacts condition not only our culture but also our lives. Art is a thought-thing, the value of which extends well beyond its material duration. For this reason, Arendt also became wary of the distorting influence of capitalism.

With Arendt, we may argue for a notion of the work of art that resists commodification; its objecthood underscores communal values rather than fetishistic tendencies. Arendt argues in The Crisis in Culture that Europe and America must rediscover and restore their objects. Such remarks are completely in line with her aesthetics. The work of art holds an extraordinary place in the contemporary world, given that it conditions an open horizon in which action is made possible. It lines our finite horizon with a continuity that reaches beyond the culture of consumerism that invades both psychic and public spaces. Constitutive of a world, material and immaterial, sensible and intelligent, transcendent and immanent, the work of art appears to occupy a crucial place in Arendt’s philosophy.

The third chapter, in turn, explores the aesthetic dimension of realness, a feature of Arendtian aesthetics that has a direct political implication. The chapter follows up on the discussion of public space and develops the theme of plurality through the notion of judgment. As already mentioned, Arendt used Kant’s Critique of Judgment to elaborate a politics that Kant himself never wrote. It is less known that in her readings of Kant she elaborated a possible aesthetics, becoming deeply involved in questions of sensibility and in reflections on the five senses. In other words, Arendt’s reading of Critique of Judgment gives hints of an aesthetics that she never completed. Here I offer an aesthetic interpretation of Arendt’s notion of judging, in which judging according to sensus communis does not mean agreeing on a common theme or solution but rather striving toward a sense of realness. Such sharing can only be achieved through a certain readiness to be impinged on with regards to sense-perception; the question of judgment is intertwined with that of how we see things.

To many, Arendt, who preceded the turn of critical theory toward psychoanalysis and poststructuralism, may appear old-fashioned, promoting a view of the world as coherent and meaningful. Arendt’s critics, such as Chantal Mouffe, have deplored a lack of antagonism in her worldview. However, the fragmentation of the world is not a fact to belie or hide; it is a given, a factuality. It takes an extraordinary effort, on the part of individual and the community, to construct and maintain a sense of realness. Art and aesthetic judgment contribute to that effort.

The two final chapters examine Arendt’s encounter with particular works of art, looking in particular at the political implications they hold for her. The fourth chapter discusses Arendt’s notion of tragedy. Tragedy shows how different kinds of law shape different forms of lives. Arendt’s reading of tragedy offers a perspective on state foundation that further enhances her ideas of our political horizon as populated and embedded. Tragedy offers a key to Arendt’s understanding of exile and colonization, and her reading of Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus is of particular interest here. The fifth chapter, in turn, takes up Arendt’s comments on Charlie Chaplin and discusses questions of identification and marginalization, anti-Semitism, and modernity in view of Chaplin’s cinematic art. Here, Arendt’s remarks can be considered in the light of the Frankfurt School and other philosophers working in the tradition of critical theory: anti-Semitism is a symptom that cannot be read in isolation from class struggle, racism, and colonialism. It must be seen in conjunction, also, with a contemporary rightslessness that informs not only political but also aesthetic forms of struggle.

Some of the material in this book—for instance, the chapters on tragedy, Chaplin, and the work of art—has been published in other forms. However, even this material has been rewritten. I would like to thank the Baltic Sea Foundation for having offered support for the completion of this book, as well as Vitterhetsakademien, Wenner-Grens Stiftelse, and DAAD. The philosophy department at the Humboldt University of Berlin invited me as a visiting fellow, which allowed me to finalize this book, and my own institution, Södertörn University, granted me leave. The Hannah Arendt–Zentrum at Oldenburg University also offered help in my research.

I would not have been able to finalize this manuscript without the support of family, friends, and colleagues. I would like to extend my gratitude, in particular, to Ariella Azoulay, Ulrika Björk, Oliver Bruns, Marcia Cavalcante Schuback, Yat Friedman Rahel Jaeggi, Anders Johansson, Bernard Flynn, Johan Hartle, Christoph Menke, Fredrika Spindler, Sven-Olov Wallenstein, and Eva Ziarek. Many more would have deserved a mention here, and none are forgotten—they are all part of this book.

 1   SENSING SPACE

ART AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE

AN AESTHETICS FOR OUR TIME

IF HANNAH ARENDT had produced an aesthetic theory, what would it have looked like? Although readings of and philosophizing over works of art occupy only a small section of her work, their place is pivotal. Arendt was profoundly engaged in poetry and literature. She dedicated a great part of her philosophical life to the study of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, a main source for the modern philosophizing of aesthetics. In The Life of the Mind, she finds the philosophic ignorance of art as scandalous as the ignorance of politics.¹ Her notebooks and letters contain reflections on art, literature, and music that never found their way into her published work. All of these details point to a subtext to be explored. As this book seeks to show, there is an aesthetics hidden in the work of Arendt. What would it have looked like if she had expounded upon it rather than sticking reflections in here and there?

To begin with, one must perhaps note what is missing. There is only a little reflection on visual or contemporary art. This is somewhat surprising. Arendt lived in the midst of a cultural scene that was rapidly changing, a scene drawing much theoretical attention. First, she lived in the Europe of a flourishing modernism, and then, after many years in exile in other places in the United States, in New York from 1967 onward, where the avant-garde scene grew. There was no involvement on the part of Arendt in the philosophy of aesthetics of her time, neither in the work of Theodor Adorno nor Arthur Danto nor in the debates surrounding the legacy of Clement Greenberg.

Still, the answer to the question of what an Arendtian aesthetics would have looked like must begin in her immediate environment. Her aesthetics fall well in line with the development of the art scene in her time. The critique of capitalism that was so important for the artistic avant-garde is in many ways compatible with Arendt’s philosophy. Her interest in events and phenomena rather than in the occultation of outstanding works also was typical. In the 1960s and 1970s, many artists questioned objectal forms of aesthetic expression, instead seeking to work with new forms of presentation in which the public sphere was an integral part of the work of art itself. Installations and performances stressed perspective, perception, process, and event. Art and aesthetics offered a new arena for politics.

We can place the aesthetics of Arendt in this arena. It is in this arena, also, that she herself found a contribution to be most needed. Although the expression aesthetics and politics has become a commonplace, there is no easy relation between the two. Walter Benjamin famously described the extraordinary feat of fascism in terms of aestheticization; fascism made the enjoyment of violence, and ultimately the destruction of human life, into aesthetic pleasure of the first order. Communism, he writes, responds by politicizing art.²

For Arendt, the relation between art and politics is to be seen neither in Adorno’s critique of mimesis nor in Heidegger’s unraveling of Being as lack of ground in the work of art. In fact, the tension between aesthetics and politics recurs in the animosity between Arendt and Adorno, as well as in her disregard for Heidegger. In her view, Adorno was hopelessly unpolitisch, and Heidegger was a political idiot.³ But how are we to conceive of a political aesthetics?

The starting point must be: art belongs to and takes part in the public sphere. Artists do not make things in public; they show them there. We are here touching an age-old strife between poetry and politics, more important than the struggle between philosophy and poetry: in order to sustain cultural values, art must be transposed into a realm in which it was not readily conceived.⁴ The intended appearance has consequences for the way in which works are produced. A certain inherent antagonism will therefore stick to its appearance. Whether we talk about visual works, literature, or music, art invokes exposure, action, conflict, prejudice, wonder, and bewilderment. A lot of contemporary art is created with attention to the diversity of perspectives and potential conflicts that will be produced in and through its exposure.

This fact offers a key to Arendt’s aesthetics. Working with her notion of public space and another key concept, plurality, we find that they have a particular bearing on the perception of art. Public space is not a community, and plurality is not the same as head count. These concepts have implications for the way in which our perception is formed. Arendt’s aesthetics inquires into the particular nature and function of perception and sense experience, whether that experience is made with regard to objects, artifacts, human bodies, buildings, places, or something else. Artworks are to be judged at the level where perception is formed. In this Arendt recasts, challenges, and reformulates its history, inviting a new consideration of aesthetic sensibility. Her stress on appearances introduces sense-perception, embodiment, and appearance—in short, what we could call aesthesis—as aspects of the public sphere.⁵ Certainly, discourse in terms of speeches, opinions, exchanges of meaning, and so forth is an inalienable aspect of publicness. But so are sensible exteriors in the form of forms, sounds, living bodies, movement, etc. Stories, music, and visual spectacles all contribute to the public sphere.

Art has a particular place as well in Arendt’s theory of plurality. In The Life of the Mind, plurality is discussed in terms of the sheer entertainment value of the multitude of views, sounds, and smells that accompany appearances. If philosophers have been negligent of the sentient, sensible character of the world, it is because the facticity of plurality goes against the philosophical instinct of synthetization. In philosophy, the almost infinite diversity of appearances has been reduced to truth-claims. This is a complaint that addresses more than the aesthetic insensitivity of the metaphysical tradition. It involves a forceful ontological claim: the question of being, of what is, must always be put in the plural—things are.⁶

An ontology of plurality does not simply imply a multitude of human individuals. We also deal with aesthetic objects. The concept of plurality may have an anthropological connotation, but it can never be defined as essentially human.⁷ It explains that our world is constituted by a multitude of appearances. This has consequences for how we are to view society and its makeup. The manifold forms of appearance that constitute our world bears witness to the inherently plural character of being. Consequently, ethics, politics, aesthetics, and social life need to be rethought—a task that Arendt never ceased to explore. Plurality becomes an inalienable aspect of the way in which sensible appearances are conceived.⁸ This has normative implications: Arendt will judge phenomena through the way in which they implicate, relate to, or sustain plurality. Art, of all genres, underscores the sheer joy to be found in a multitude of appearances, a quality that cannot be isolated from other strands of life.

PLURALITY AND OBJECTS

With the writings of Adorno, Rancière, Derrida, Kristeva, Butler, and Žižek, among others, one would assume that Benjamin’s theoretical distinction, between the aestheticization of politics, on one hand, and the politicization of art, on the other, has been overcome. Has Adorno not shown aesthetics to be one of the most important questions of our time, insofar as modern art survives and is somehow always ahead of society, almost despite itself, surviving not only the alienating forces of capitalism but also the terror of Auschwitz?⁹ Have we not also seen Rancière formulate a politics of aesthetics in which the idea that art can be politicized becomes an oxymoron: art is always political through the way in which it both disseminates and reconstructs sensible experience.¹⁰ According to Wolfgang Welsch, philosophical aesthetics must be rethought in order to meet the aestheticization of contemporary life, not least with regard to public spaces that have become hyperaestheticized to the extent that art (in order to distinguish itself from design) serves more as an annoyance than a decoration.¹¹ All of this indicates that we need to rethink plurality, context, perspective, and style in order to broaden the academic field of aesthetics, exploring the way in which sensibility responds to the exploitation and commodification of the public sphere. For this kind of work, the writings of Arendt are essential.

There are a great number of positions taken on the political implications of Arendt’s concept of plurality. Three main strands can be discerned that sometimes intersect and sometimes cancel each other out: the normative, the universalist, and the differential readings. The first position is a response to Arendt’s lack of grounding: nothing happens simply because we bring a group of people together with various points of view.¹² If we are to follow Arendt, political conflicts become agonistic, which leaves them without normative implications or transformative powers.¹³ Here Arendt’s public sphere is seen as a space of deliberation where participants lack marks of gender, class, nationality, and so on. From this viewpoint, something must be added. This could be a transcendent aspect that Arendt does not add herself, in order to gain a ground for, for instance, human rights.¹⁴ Others, such as Richard J. Bernstein, hold that Arendt’s concept of plurality implies a normative elaboration of discourse that brings her close to Jürgen Habermas. Both Arendt and Habermas see the public sphere producing a certain disinterestedness, which supersedes the individual and grounds politics.¹⁵ Arguing against such a reading, Seyla Benhabib has pointed out that it assumes democratic principles to be upheld by an autonomous public sphere.¹⁶ Dissatisfied by such an addition, Benhabib instead argues for the absence of normative foundations, suggesting a reading based on an anthropological universalism through which Arendt’s account of humanity crosses any kind of historical or cultural barriers.¹⁷ Dana Villa, in turn, compares Arendt to Foucault and Lyotard, who saw the public sphere as fragmented; plurality means that the common, or consensus, is never to be achieved in the political arena of a modern state.¹⁸ On the other hand, plurality is a political tool in positing institutions as important constituents of the public sphere.¹⁹ Other authors affirm the differentiating character of plurality yet end up binding features of commonality. For Bonnie Honig, Arendtian plurality implies both equality and distinctiveness. Emphasizing the singularity of the political agent, Arendt shows it to be distinctive. At the same time, the performative feature of plurality grounds a possibility of sharing through that distinctiveness.²⁰ Judith Butler has proposed that plurality entails that we cannot politically fabricate the setting of our social, religious, and cultural environment. The most burning issues of politics and ethics present themselves in the confrontation with this factual makeup of society.²¹

In my reading, I argue for a position that involves both a factual and a normative reading, adding one crucial aspect: plurality is not merely to be conceived in human terms. It is bound to a dialectic of differentiation at an ontological level through the manifold of appearances. The philosophical exploration of the question of being is immediately confronted with its plural character; it does not make sense to return to the question of being as placed in a singular mode.²² If we disregard the full implications of plurality, we may end up in a universalist position that might be close to essentialism. The difference could be formulated roughly: a normative reading of plurality may promote certain ethical and political visions of what society can become; a universalist reading would assert what a human being is. Arendt’s insistence on ontological presuppositions in her philosophy of plurality serves to undo a humanist, universalist position. This has implications for her aesthetics.

This comes to the fore as one develops Arendt’s argument of plurality in a phenomenological direction, a direction that is certainly present in The Life of the Mind: plurality already operates at the level of perception. Plurality never presents itself. It comes into being through a multitude of appearances but does not