Doing Aesthetics with Arendt

How to See Things

Cecilia Sjöholm

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780231539906
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

Cecilia Sjöholm reads Hannah Arendt as a philosopher of the senses, grappling with questions of vision, hearing, and touch even in her political work. Constructing an Arendtian theory of aesthetics from the philosopher's fragmentary writings on art and perception, Sjöholm begins a vibrant new chapter in Arendt scholarship that expands her relevance for contemporary philosophers.

Arendt wrote thoughtfully about the role of sensibility and aesthetic judgment in political life and on the power of art to enrich human experience. Sjöholm draws a clear line from Arendt's consideration of these subjects to her reflections on aesthetic encounters and works of art mentioned in her published writings and stored among her memorabilia. This delicate effort allows Sjöholm to revisit Arendt's political concepts of freedom, plurality, and judgment from an aesthetic point of view and incorporate Arendt's insight into current discussions of literature, music, theater, and visual art. Though Arendt did not explicitly outline an aesthetics, Sjöholm's work substantively incorporates her perspective into contemporary reckonings with radical politics and their relationship to art.

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 itself appear. The diversity of things and the variety of perspectives are all embedded in our vision. This does not merely imply that our perspective is to be conceived in phenomenological terms as a factor of embodiment. The bodies and viewpoint of others that lie embedded in our vision do not only produce flesh, or imaginary constructs. We are disturbed, daunted, and distracted by our attempts to create a vision of the world as a whole. Our vision is conditioned by plurality; this means that it is always impinged upon.²³ Such impingement does not necessarily occur through direct interference. The actions, gestures, words, and movements of other people underlie our sensible experience. The differentiation that protrudes from other bodies and the vision of others that affect my vision generate the sensible qualities that I perceive in the space that surrounds me.

In this way, plurality underlies the notion of world as well. It appears through plurality, when things are seen in a number of ways.²⁴ Arendt’s concept of “world” is intimately linked to the realm of “human artifice” and implies that objects of art are an integral part of plurality.²⁵ “World” is that which appears “in between” people.²⁶ Here we find the work of art.

The Life of the Mind elaborates the idea that plurality entails a multiplicity of perspectives, histories, and biographies in a phenomenological direction. Acting, thinking, and judging are all activities depending on the plurality of the public sphere. These three activities correspond to Arendt’s three major works: The Human Condition (acting, or vita activa), The Life of the Mind (thinking), and the unfinished Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (judging). In each of these works, the public sphere is inhabited by a multitude of perspectives and by differentiation. This opens a view of plurality in which we do not merely deal with a multitude of individuals. We deal, also, with the presence of aesthetic objects.²⁷

PUBLIC SPACE, PLURALITY, AND THE SPACE OF ART

Public space is a contingent construction; it rises and deflates and is based on other factors than identification and belonging. The arbitrary factor is crucial. In modernity, the arena of public affairs is no longer restricted to a location like the res publica, or the public square. Instead, virtual communication through digital media offers a new kind of reach. Participants and their readiness to interact and communicate in and through the technologies, architectures, and social orders will create new spaces. A public space may be re...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• 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
• Series List