Reconquering Polynarrative and Plurality: Arendts Political
Phenomenology
Jasmina Tacheva
Abstract:
This paper examines the status of narrative in late capitalist
society and claims that despite capitalisms promises to not just
deliver the goods, but also to offer a virtually limitless variety
of choices, what reality amounts to is a very constrained landscape
of only the latest, most viable options available on the market.
This process limits the ability of human beings to be actors in the
political realm, but it also deprives them of the possibility to be
world spectators an idea Kant advances in The Critique of Aesthetic
Judgment, which Hannah Arendt picks up and expands upon in her
Lectures on Kants Political Philosophy, by focusing on the
sociability aspect of a reading public always in the plural which
serves as the foundation for judgment. It is argued that the
concept of judgment is Arendts attempt to overcome the shortcomings
she finds in Husserls phenomenological project in favor of a
political phenomenology that can be practiced collectively by the
members of the community.After investigating Arendts analysis of
both plurality and the characteristics of critical thinking and
judgment, this paper turns to a major conflict identified by Arendt
in her reading of Kants third Critique that between actor and
spectator. The paper suggests that by inventively reconciling the
two on the plateau of sociability, Arendt charts a way to bring
about social change through the power of personal narratives.
Concrete examples of the strong influence of this transformation
are provided from the fields of feminism and environmentalism.
IntroductionIn the spirit of Arendts Lectures on Kants Political
Philosophy, this paper explores the political implications of being
and thinking in todays world, and claims that one such consequence
is the scientification of the capitalist narrative, seeking to
express every process with a formula that can be replicated and
re-used to classify or evaluate new data a process of mechanization
that nonetheless assumes the role of hard science with undeniable
laws that can ostensibly not be rejected by common sense because
they are able to explain general trends while ruling out or
otherwise disguising (indeed, actively striving to eliminate)
outliers that, in this paradigm, represent noise, uncertainty, or
simply deviations from the norm. Thus, while Lyotards diagnosis of
skepticism towards metanarratives in postmodernity may indeed hold,
what counts as narrative has dramatically changed in late
capitalism, taking the capitalist narrative out of its narrative
milieu and elevating it to the level of science or the even harder
to disprove state of common sense. The direct political implication
of this is the economization of both business and private social
relations which capitalist logic infuses with the Pareto principle
(80-20 rule/law of the vital few) 80% of profits come from the top
20% of your customers, etc. What this amounts to is the false
dilemma of having to decide who is more important and who should
count less in plain opposition to Arendts rigorous attempt to
restore, in todays moral and political thought, the importance of
particulars she finds in Kant. The generality of capitalist logic
aims at identifying a common trend, or an interesting pattern (two
drivers of data mining), whereas Arendts notion of generality
includes a perspective able to incorporate all actual and potential
particulars. What we end up with, then, is a progressive
destruction of polynarrativity in favor of a mainstream typifying
mononarrative that effectively replaces human plurality with the
most current market trend. This way, the monologic of a hegemonic
narrative parading as a hard science is introduced and actively
sustained in a world that wants us to know we can buy anything, but
change nothing. A way out of this is possible, through concept of
judgment advanced by Arendt who, it is argued in this paper, takes
on the phenomenological project started by Husserl and expanded
upon by Heidegger, and brings it into the political realm where it
can be practiced by the community collectively. Plurality and
JudgmentIn her Lectures on Kants Political Philosophy (hereafter
Lectures) Hannah Arendt examines Kants work in search of the
political philosophy he never explicitly formulated. She is
convinced that signs of his thinking about political questions can
be found throughout his philosophical oeuvre, despite always
seemingly on the periphery, particularly in his later years that
resulted in his third and last Critique, the Critique of Judgment.
It is no small irony that in a similar fashion, Arendt herself did
not live to more than type the first page of what was meant to be
the third and concluding part of her elaboration on the vita
contemplativa, comprising the parts Thinking, Willing, and the
unfinished Judgment of The Life of the Mind. As Ronald Beiner
suggests, the groundwork for this last part can be discovered
precisely in the Lectures where she investigates Kants principles
of aesthetic judgment in order to incorporate them in the wider
canvas of judging in the political realm. This paper argues,
furthermore, that Arendts political philosophy is a valuable
extension to phenomenology, since it builds upon the foundation
provided by Husserl and Heidegger by exploring the sociopolitical
dimension both thinkers shied away from in their analyses. The
philosophical tutelage Arendt received from Heidegger is widely
discussed and almost notorious, whereas the semester she spent
studying under Husserl in 1926 is much less known,[endnoteRef:1]
perhaps because while she often comments on the philosophy of the
former in both her theoretical and personal writings, the only
explicit mentioning of Husserls phenomenology is to be found in one
of the first philosophical pieces she published after the end of
World War II, the 1946 article What Is Existential Philosophy.
There, she welcomes Husserls (to be sure, from Arendts perspective,
not entirely understood by Husserl himself) attempt to part with
historicism as the central pillar of philosophy since Hegel
(something that, curiously enough, she ascribes to Kant as well in
her much later Lectures on Kants Political Philosophy), while still
criticizing the impracticability of his otherwise admirable project
of returning to the things themselves which she compares to
Hofmannsthals appreciation for little things.[endnoteRef:2] She
calls classicist the wish of the two to conjure up a new home from
a world perceived as alien[endnoteRef:3] - a project she herself
will undertake much later in The Human Condition, which has become
known as her amor mundi love of the world which Julia Kristeva sees
as the red thread connecting all her works.[endnoteRef:4] It is
thus surprising that she would be so critical of Husserls project
which she calls a liberation of philosophy, but which, according to
her, reflects both profound modesty when it comes to the careful
attention to the smallest things in the universe, and also the open
and naive hubris of hoping that man can become what man cannot be:
the creator of the world and of himself.[endnoteRef:5] Her later
concept of natality, the possibility to be re-born in the political
realm, seemingly follows in Husserls footsteps, but the important
difference between her view of Husserls phenomenology and her
conceptualization of natality, the one that shines through in the
quote above, is Arendts both materialist [through her reading of
Marx], although she would not admit it, and social perception of
the world as existing long before any of us and as continuing to
exist long after we vanish not just in terms of Kants ruse of
nature, but even more so in terms of the political accomplishments
of humans in both the past and the future a perspective for which
her understanding of Husserl makes him sound too individualistic
and too cut-off from the communality that is at the crux of the
human world as she sees it. Her love of the world is the love of
something already existing that can be changed, for better or for
worse, but something we do not have either the first or the last
word about, not of the need, as she reads Husserl, to (re)create it
first, be it just in our own consciousness. [1: See, for example,
the biographical notes in Hannah Arendts ber das Bse: eine
Vorlesung zu Fragen der Ethik, Piper 2007.] [2: See What Is
Existential Philosophy in Arendts Essays in Understanding, p. 165.]
[3: Ibid., p. 165] [4: See Julia Kristeva, Hannah Arendt: Life as a
Narrative, 2001.] [5: What Is Existential Philosophy, pp.
166-67.]
It shall be noted that for Arendt, the political is the sphere
where the highest form of human activity, action, is carried out,
in public. By public she means the world itself, in so far as it is
common to all of us and distinguished from our privately owned
place in it.[endnoteRef:6] An important consideration in this
respect is Arendts notion of the in-between, our embeddedness in
the world that both brings us together and keeps us apart: 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; the world, like every in-between, relates
and separates men at the same time.[endnoteRef:7] This in-between
is literally something which inter-est, which lies between people
and therefore can relate and bind them together.[endnoteRef:8] But
there is another in-between, which has overgrown the first one -
the web of human relationships which is intangible because it
consists of deeds and words and owes its origin exclusively to mens
acting and speaking directly to one another.[endnoteRef:9] Arendt
terms this interrelatedness plurality, which she categorizes as the
state of the common world as being divided into a great many units,
and it is only as a member of such a unit, that is, of a community,
that men are ready for action. [endnoteRef:10] This essential
condition of plurality is the basic condition of both action and
speech,[endnoteRef:11] which, in turn, comprise the condition of
all forms of political organization.[endnoteRef:12] The very
existence of freedom in the political realm is possible only in the
sphere of human plurality,[endnoteRef:13] but even more importantly
than making the political possible, it is one of the basic
existential conditions of human life on earth.[endnoteRef:14] [6:
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago, IL: The University of
Chicago Press, 1958, p. 52.] [7: Ibid.] [8: Human Condition, p. 182
cf. On Revolution, p. 86] [9: Arendt, Human Condition, p. 183] [10:
Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace
& Company, 1978, p. 201.] [11: Arendt, Human Condition, p. 175]
[12: Ibid., p. 202] [13: Arendt, Life of the Mind, p. 200; she
expresses a similar idea in Essays in Understanding, p. 436: our
concept of freedom, at least in its political aspects, is
inconceivable outside of plurality. ] [14: Ibid., p. 74 ]
While in The Human Condition Arendt approaches plurality from
the perspective of action, in the Lectures the focus is on
judgment. Here, she announces two key findings in Kants Critique of
Judgment closely related to the constitution of plurality: first,
that in his last Critique, Kant does not speak of man as an
intelligible or a cognitive being, but of men in the plural, as
they really are and live in society, and second, that the faculty
of judgment deals with particulars.[endnoteRef:15] These
observations are indispensable to plurality because they hold the
promise of preventing the exclusion of human beings from the public
based on rationality or generality criteria, i.e. no one can be
stopped from partaking in the political world on the grounds of
lacking cognitive abilities or because they do not conform to some
general idea of what a person should be. The defining condition
Arendt finds in Kants third Critique is rather political freedom
which he defines as to make public use of ones reason at every
point, whereby Kant means the use which a person makes of it as a
scholar before a reading public. [endnoteRef:16] Here, already it
is clear that the solitude typically associated with thinking is
overcome by thought being confronted with a public, and not just
any kind of public, but a reading one, which means that for this
process to take place, both an actively thinking conveyor of
thought and a no less actively thinking group of recipients are
needed. Moreover, Arendt explains that the term scholar here is not
as restrictive as it might appear at first glance, and that in
Kants vision the scholar is in fact a broader concept than the
citizen who is bound to the tradition and legality of a particular
country; the scholar is, in fact, a member of a society of world
citizens,[endnoteRef:17] or as Arendt then states, a world
spectator,[endnoteRef:18] an onlooker who can discover a meaning in
the course taken by events; a meaning that the actors
ignored,[endnoteRef:19] since the spectator is impartial by
definition no part is assigned to him[endnoteRef:20] The reading
public itself, cannot be a public of actors or participators in
government,[endnoteRef:21] hence, it is also comprised of
spectators, but, unlike the traditional view of the spectator as a
solitary figure (she gives the chained inhabitants of Platos cave
parable as an example to show that contemplation has traditionally
been viewed as conducted in private[endnoteRef:22]), for Kant, and
subsequently Arendt, the spectator observing the spectacle of
history exists only in the plural The spectator is not involved in
the act, but he is always involved with fellow spectators. He does
not share the faculty of genius, originality, with the maker or the
faculty of novelty with the actor; the faculty they have in common
is the faculty of judgment.[endnoteRef:23] [15: Hannah Arendt,
Lectures on Kants Political Philosophy, p. 13] [16: Lectures, 39]
[17: Lectures, 39] [18: Lectures, 44] [19: Lectures, 55] [20:
Lectures, 56] [21: Lectures, 60] [22: Lectures, 59] [23: Lectures,
63]
Acting or Judging?It thus appears that the way opinion plays out
in the political realm is by being delivered by a spectator to a
multiplicity of spectators an image much different from the scenes
Arendts vita activa presents in The Human Condition. Oddly, the two
conditions need not be mutually exclusive: In the Lectures, one by
one Arendt overthrows age-old conventions such as the secondary
importance of a spectator vis--vis the primacy of the actor, or the
inferiority of the spectators taste compared to the productive
imagination needed to create a work of art to be judged by that
taste,[endnoteRef:24] in order to alleviate the antagonism between
theory and practice in political matters which is the distinction
between the spectator and the actor.[endnoteRef:25] Arendt realizes
that historically, a great challenge in this conflict has been
presented by the incommunicability of an evidently subjective and
inner sense such as taste (one can only woo or court the agreement
of everyone else[endnoteRef:26]), but plurality, with its
manifestation in publicity, enables her to turn this obstacle into
an opportunity, the inauguration of a conversation, first with
oneself, and then with the public. The way this general
incommunicability stemming from the uniqueness and singularity of
taste becomes shareable, according to Arendt, is through tastes
transformation into judgment via the faculties of imagination and
common sense. Based on her reading of Kant, Arendt defines
imagination as the faculty of having present what is
absent.[endnoteRef:27] Its importance in the process of rendering
communicable what is innately personal lies in its capacity to make
an object into something I do not have to be directly confronted
with but that I have in some sense internalized, so that I now can
be affected by it as though it were given to me by a nonobjective
sense.[endnoteRef:28] This step signifies the passage from taste to
judgment, since now the proper distance needed for impartiality
which is the condition of judgment, has been established. The
second part of this process is the appeal to what is for Kant an
extra, sixth sense as it were, that fits us into a community sensus
communis, which Arendt translates as community sense, rather than
common sense, to make clear that it has to do with the ability to
take the community into consideration, and not with the reasonably
expected understanding common to all that the latter has been used
to denote.[endnoteRef:29] Enhanced by sociability, mans need to be
in the company of other human beings, these two steps bring one
closer to the necessary condition for the greatest possible
enlargement of the enlarged mentality what Kant calls the original
compact, regulating not just our reflections but actually inspiring
our actions. It is here, in this idea, or rather in the desire and
willingness for it - for reaching out to the greatest number of
standpoints, it very potentiality, regardless of whether it is
actually brought to fruition, that actor and spectator become
united.[endnoteRef:30] [24: Lectures, 62] [25: Lectures, 65] [26:
Lectures, 72] [27: Lectures, 66] [28: Lectures, 67] [29: Lectures,
70] [30: Lectures, 75]
Where We Are Today From an Arendtian point of view, it should
not be difficult to see how in late capitalism, it appears that
people are being prepared predominantly for the toil of the
activities of labor and work, rather than for the capacity of
political action. This way, preference is given precisely to the
view Arendt, through Kant, opposes most ardently viewing humans as
a means to an end, in this case, the end of sustaining an economic
system through the functionalization of human qualities,
streamlined into tools used for its perpetuation. This, however, is
not the focus of the following analysis. What is at its heart, is a
more subtle but no less deleterious critique, generated from
Arendts position on judgment. Whereas the consequences of action or
non-action in the political realm are by the very nature of this
human activity easy to see, those of suspending judgment are less
visible, but no less dangerous in the long run. In what follows,
several contributing factors to this threat of extinction of
judgment are examined.To begin with, the erasure of the boundaries
between theoretical and applied, or public and industry knowledge
has often been noted.[endnoteRef:31] The results-based culture
thriving on this instrumentalized knowledge places far greater
emphasis on application and use than on explanation ambiguities are
managed without an attempt at being resolved, as long as they can
meet the desired prediction target. In the field of data mining,
the increasing use of neural networks as models for solving data
aggregation problems can be given as an example of black box
systems where interpretability has given precedence to model
fitness conglomerates of ostensibly weakly correlated data sources
(such as NFL scores used as inputs to predict stock prices on Wall
Street) are being fed into the model, whereby explanation of the
actual relationship between data bits is abandoned completely, and
only the models performance of actually approximating the real
values of target variables is factored in.[endnoteRef:32] This way,
a greater scope of topics and areas of interest is covered, but the
understanding thereof is becoming thinner and thinner. [31: The
latest occasion I have had to witness this view was a lecture by
University at Buffalos Sociology professor Steve G. Hoffman,
entitled Capitalism in Academia, in March, 2015.] [32: Jiawei Han,
Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques, 3rd edition, 2011.]
What is even worse, these garbage models trying to map human
behavior onto a market basket, despite their obvious deficiencies
in explanatory power because of their almost complete randomness,
somehow successfully usurp the role of a rigorous science, because
of their approximation of real-world market interactions. The laws
of the market seem today almost as undeniable as the laws of
nature. Reagan and Thatchers no alternative slogan of capitalism
thus becomes doubly dangerous, since apart from the sterility of
the opposition in politics, they spell the eclipse of judgment in
Arendts common political realm not just parties have stopped
envisioning a different future, but most of us as well. The way the
law absolves us from the necessity to negotiate and define every
social relationship anew each time, by taking capitalism as a
given, we effectively abdicate from the responsibility to reflect
on it. In this paradigm, objectivity becomes objectification, and
the conventional denominator of all relations becomes the systems
utility rather than human rights once again, Arendts fear has come
true humans are turned into a means to an economic end. Coupled
with the manageriality of capitalism, its paranoid obsession with
controlling all processes and actors in order to prevent
undesirable outcomes and maximize profits, this process chips away
at the very foundation of humanity by first denominating human
beings as market agents, and then demonstrating the false necessity
of having to choose whose needs are more important, because, as the
Pareto principle makes abundantly clear, you cannot possibly
satisfy all your customers all the time. In fact, the top 20 per
cent of your customers likely generate 80 per cent of your profits,
so it is only logical, common-sensical (how different from Arendts
use of the sensus communis!) to focus on this upper stratum and
give the rest just enough so they do not resort to a different
vendor. This logic, supported by capitalisms focal point the idea
of the scarcity of resources has long ago left the market place and
penetrated social and legal relationships, or rather, the market
place has billowed to engulf these spheres of human interaction and
inject them with its logic. Because its
garbage-neural-network-predictor models work, and because of
political maneuvers of nationalizing corporate debt, we are made to
believe the system can weather any storm, so it is indeed the only
viable economic option, which gives its prosperity narrative
pseudo-scientific validity, and makes it appealing to common sense.
In his book Capitalist Realism Mark Fisher demonstrates the way in
which those not willing to buy into the viability of capitalist
scienfication and common-sensicality are pronounced hopeless
idealists or outright insane.[endnoteRef:33] Their opinions are
being communicated, but the reading audience remains indifferent,
or even worse infuriated by their attempts to subvert something
that evidently not even economic laws can subdue. The only
explanation is that the audience has stopped reading, as it were,
and has instead succumbed to the sheer dogmatism of blindly obeying
the precepts of tradition or authority, a state Kants way out of
which Arendt sees as his first awakening.[endnoteRef:34] [33: See
Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero
Books, 2009.] [34: Lectures, 32]
Uncritically following the dogmatism of capitalisms
pseudoscience and common-sensicality represents the shallowness of
the second term in the market agents form of society the system has
created. Far from being tantamount to the actions of the actors in
Arendts Lectures, the activities of market agents are closely
monitored, indeed dictated, by seemingly natural (hence, the
markets obsession with presenting its equilibrium laws as no less
valid than the laws of nature) mechanisms of supply and demand, and
the plurality which democracy promises to preserve and respect, is
transformed into general market trends whose generality, unlike the
one prescribed by Arendt, ruling out the assumption of a higher,
objective point of view in favor of acknowledging the multiplicity
of actual and potential standpoints, aims at charting the most
robust cost curve, the most accurate demand forecast, or the latest
hot commodities trending on the market. What is even worse,
however, is that aside from the illusion of a possibility for
genuine action the system presents, the role of a world spectator,
the way Kant conceives of it, has also been greatly limited, again,
by the dogmatism mentioned above. Thus, sociability, what Adam
Phillips calls the unwilled choreography of society,[endnoteRef:35]
is fundamentally threatened by the possibility of conversation, the
conversation about particulars, ceasing altogether. [35: Adam
Phillips, Becoming Freud Lecture at University at Buffalo, April
27, 2015.]
Narrative as a Way outIn Arendts creative reconciliation of
spectator and actor via sociability lies a potent opportunity for
social change. The way it can be brought about is through narrative
judgment, more specifically, through sharing the plurality of
narratives that under the current system are silenced, typified, or
streamlined into either a general norm, served by the market (as
per the Pareto principle), or deviations from that norm that the
behavioral manageriality approach tries to either isolate and
disregard, or bring back to the centrality of the regression line
depicting the conformity of the general public. Is it too
far-fetched to suggest that the two steps Arendt describes as
comprising the process of transformation of taste into judgment
imagination and community sense, are also the underlying elements
of narrative? Through imagination, making present what is absent, a
name, an account, a story is born, that is then bounced off of a
community, real or imaginary, which picks it up and re-activates it
through remembering or retelling, thereby achieving the apparently
impossible giving the particulars a public voice, a public memory,
a public response. As the documentary about the story of the Second
Wave of feminism in America, She Is Beautiful When Shes Angry
(Dore, 2014), shows through a series of interviews with Ellen
Willis, Alix Kates Shulman, Kate Millett, Rita Mae Brown, and other
iconoclastic feminist pioneers, before oppression can be
recognized, in the political, social, or legal realm, it has to be
named first, it has to be made present in the minds not just of the
victims and perpetrators, but also of people who likely never
experienced it. Imagination needs to be employed. The film traces
the entrance of the concepts of sexual harassment and domestic
violence into the social and legal realm, their naming - the
initial, challenging, laborious, but at the same time absolutely
essential and indispensable step towards fighting it. As Ruth Rosen
explains in the movie, We named it, then made it
illegal.[endnoteRef:36] By giving sexual repression a name, what
Arendt sees in Kant as preparing the idea for reflection, is
performed the concept has entered sociability through the process
of communicability now it can be shared with others, it can be put
to the test of sensus communis and debated in common. [36: She Is
Beautiful When She Is Angry, Dir. Mary Dore, 2014]
A name is always a starting point. Activist and journalist Naomi
Klein makes this abundantly clear when she explains with regard to
This Changes Everything - her newest book which aims at putting the
question of environmental destruction square on the table of the
common, in Arendtian parlance. She explains that in interviews, the
first question is usually precisely about the name of the book what
is it that changes everything? To which she is well prepared (for
this is exactly the effect she says she has sought with the title
in the first place) to reply, the environment.[endnoteRef:37] This
is the first step, imagination has been employed, a name has been
given, the absent has been made present, and memorably so. Next
comes sharing the judgment contained within the name with the
public. Through this process, the name is effectively filled with
the personal narratives of the spectators, whether acting or not,
but always reflecting. The name forces reflection, it does not
leave anyone indifferent, and this is precisely Arendts point on
imagination. After the idea of sexual harassment was given a name,
a multitude of women realized they were not alone and gathered to
share their stories, not just among one another, but in front of
the world; they forced the world to become a reading public, be it
at the expense of having to confront people not willing to listen
on a daily basis. The power of personal narratives has not escaped
Naomi Kleins attention either. Her book starts out with a
captivating account of her reading from a childrens book to her
two-year-old son. The name of the book is Have You Ever Seen a
Moose?, and as Klein reads it over and over again to her spellbound
son, it suddenly hits her that he might never see a moose, based on
the observations of the Beaver Lake Cree Nation about the toxicity
of the water moose drink from.[endnoteRef:38] Will he ever see a
moose? a simple question spelling the manifold disastrous effects
of an impending environmental monstrosity in a way that cannot be
denied. Personal narrative elevates the position of the spectator
to that of the actor in terms of the potentiality of its social
influence because it cuts to the heart of indifference and prompts
reflection. It holds undeniable truth that is very different from
the one offered by science, especially by the pseudoscience of
capitalism: Truth in the sciences is dependent on the experiment
that can be repeated by others; it requires general validity.
Philosophic truth has no such general validity. What it must have,
what Kant demanded in the Critique of Judgment of judgments of
taste, is general communicability, writes Arendt in her
Lectures.[endnoteRef:39] If this example is not enough, or if it
seems insufficient since it comes from a developed Western country
that still chooses to close its eyes to the undeniable reality of
destruction (even though entire states, like California, struggle
with the consequences of reckless exploitation of natural
resources), the power of personal narrative can be demonstrated
with yet another instance of environmental activism Chai Jings film
about air pollution in China, Under the Dome (2015), or rather, as
Kant would say, not with the event of the film itself, but with the
way it was perceived by the audience and what opinions it
generated. The number of views has been growing exponentially, to
the point where even the Chinese government could not remain silent
on the issue. What captivates in this film is not just the
well-documented, amply researched correlation between disease and
air pollution; what truly shocks and invokes reflection, not just
intellectual one, but more importantly, sensed, lived reflection,
is the string of simple and yet resounding questions asked by Jing
to a six-year-old girl living in an area heavily impacted by the
smog in a similar vein as Kleins questions about the future of her
son: Have you ever seen stars?, Have you ever seen white clouds?
No. - Perhaps the longest monosyllable in the history of humanity.
One that condemns a long, irresponsible past, but at the same time
charts a gloomy, uncertain future. [37: Naomi Klein, This Changes
Everything Capitalism vs. the Climate, September 30, 2014] [38:
Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything, p. 30] [39: Lectures, 40]
Judgment, Arendt explains in her Lectures, is about things of
the past, but it is also true that without judgment there can be no
future, at least not a non-catastrophic one. In the preface to the
Human Condition Arendt warns humanity of its growing ability to
destroy the world; this warning has progressed into an unwavering
sense of urgency in Kleins This Changes Everything and Jings Under
the Dome. Here, the mere possibility of destruction has given way
to an environmental apocalypse in full throttle that has erased
most hope for reversal. And yet most of us remain calm in the face
of a disaster that has already begun to unfold; those who have not
encountered these powerful narratives, at least. Those who have,
are beginning to wonder. Or reflect. And hopefully judge. Without a
community of judging spectators, the world might cease to exist
tomorrow. The phenomenological question is no longer how to
recreate the world in ones consciousness, but rather how to
preserve it from utter destruction. And this question can only be
addressed by a phenomenology that is deeply political.
References:Arendt, Hannah. Lectures on Kants Political
Philosophy. 1989.
--- --- ---. The Human Condition. Chicago, IL: The University of
Chicago Press, 1958.
--- --- ---. The Life of the Mind. Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace
& Company, 1978.
--- --- ---. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York, NY:
Meridian Books, 1962.
Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero
Books, 2009.
Han, Jiawei. Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques, 3rd edition,
2011.
Hoffman, Steve G. Capitalism in Academia, lecture at University
at Buffalo, March, 2015.
Klein, Naomi. This Changes Everything. Alfred A. Knopf Canada,
2014.
Phillips, Adam. Becoming Freud Lecture at University at Buffalo,
April 27, 2015.
Shes Beautiful When Shes Angry, directed by Mary Dore, 2014.
This Changes Everything Capitalism vs. the Climate. Naomi Klein.
September 30, 2014
Under the Dome, directed by Chai Jing, 2015.
