Gezi Park - Reminders for Political Theorists

A couple of reports on Gezi Park that offer important reminders for political theorists. The first from the BBC addressed the uses of humor in politics. Here there is a paper by Elizabeth Spelman ("Anger the Diary") that contrasts the distinct impact of anger, which empowers the aggrieved, and humor, which deflates the pretensions of the powerful.  And, of course, this argument subverts the dichotomy between rationality and the emotions (see, generally, Amelie Rorty) - the connections between rationality and emotions are various.  The second - here - is from Michael Kimmelman at The New York Times who underscores (among other things) both Hannah Arendt's claim that the exercise of freedom presupposes public space and Jim Scott's quasi-anarchist arguments about resistance to regimentation of (among other things) space.

Politics, Freedom ~ Lessons from OWS

“Hence, in spite of the great influence that the concept of an inner, nonpolitical freedom has exerted upon the tradition of thought, it seems safe to say that man would know nothing of inner freedom if he had not first experienced a condition of being free as a worldly tangible reality. We first become aware of freedom or its opposite in our intercourse with others, not in the intercourse with ourselves. Before it became an attribute of thought or a quality of the will, freedom was understood as a free man’s status, which enabled him to move, to get away from home, to go out into the world and meet other people in deed and word. This freedom clearly was preceded by liberation: in order to be free, man must have liberated himself from the necessities of life. But the status of freedom did not follow automatically upon the act of liberation. Freedom needed, in addition to mere liberation, the company of other men who were in the same state, and it needed a common public space to meet them – a politically organized world, in other words, into which each of the free men could insert himself by word and deed.”

~ Hannah Arendt "What is Freedom?"

Photograph © Victoria Schultz.

A few days ago I posted on a brief essay Todd Gitlin had written for The Chronicle of Higher Education regarding the hollowing out of the (allegedly) constitutionally protected right to assemble. It turns out that that essay simply reprinted the final pages of his recent book Occupy Nation*, a sympathetic, albeit not blindly uncritical, assessment of Occupy Wall Street. The book is a reasonably quick read and a fair treatment. It includes a bunch of terrific photos by Victoria Schultz - one of which I've lifted above.

Among the salutary aspects of Gitlin's book is the extended attention he pays to the question of where we might go from here, the we being those progressives for whom the Occupy challenge to political-economic inequality resonates deeply. And it seems to me that the image I've borrowed from Schultz points the way; from Occupy to a push for the extension and protection of political rights - by means of constitutional politics if need be. There is, after all, no affirmative right to vote in the US Constitution - a weakness underscored by Republican sponsored voter suppression laws (e.g., voter ID requirements, etc.). And, as Gitlin points out, the actual constitutional freedom to assemble in public has been more or less thoroughly whittled away. It seems to me that organizing and mobilizing to redress those problems is a pressing matter and might help reconstruct the platform from which to upend political-economic injustices.

Freedom, as Arendt argues, presupposes public space and access to it. If they did nothing else, the Occupy activists, underscored just how tenuous our putative freedoms otherwise are.
_________
* Todd Gitlin. Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street. !tbooks/Harper Collins, 2012.

Thinking with Photography about Politics and Power.

Well, this morning I am off to give an informal presentation to the cultural studies folks at University of Linköping. Title? "Thinking with Photography about Politics and Power." Basically this talk is a brief for thinking harder about the pragmatics of photography and focusing less on the aesthetics of images.  Examples? Daniel Hernández-Salazar, Richard Avedon, Joel Sternfeld, and Richard Ross.  And, of course, a dose of Arendt and Foucault. Should be fun!

Thoughts on Political Space

There is a typically provocative piece by Rebecca Solnit here at TomDispatch.com. As she tends to do, Solnit ranges widely, drawing parallels and inferences that may not immediately seem apparent, but that actually coalesce into a persuasive pattern. All in the service of peddling of what she calls 'hope in the dark.' And there is a video here at Al Jazeera about the role of images and new social media in fomenting and sustaining the 'Arab Spring.' The various amateurs interviewed for the video bring to mind the phrase a democracy of images that became the title for the post-9/11 exhibition in lower Manhattan. The phrase travels well.

To their credit, the reporters who constructed the video strive to impress on viewers that the revolution was made by real bodies - courageous and vulnerable - in the streets and not just by images. Indeed, both Solnit and the Al Jazeera video reminds me of what Allan Sekula wrote in the preface to his series of photographs "Waiting for Teargas: White Globe to Black" where he wrote of the WTO protests in Seattle - "something very simple is missed by descriptions of this as a movement founded in cyberspace: the human body asserts itself in the streets against the abstraction of global capital." Solnit forms her essay as a letter to the young vendor Mohammed Bouazizi whose self-immolation ignited the Tunisian revolution and much else by extension. And the videographers have their subjects - the individuals who filmed crucial episodes in the protests in Tunisia and Egypt - acknowledge the heroes in the streets, risking life and limb against the security forces. Yes, images and social media are new tools, but what they depict and disseminate are real agents taking real actions in dangerous situations. So while Sekula's phrasing is oddly passive - "the human body asserts itself" - I think he is on to something about the power of actual embodied protesters asserting themselves and being caught in the act.

This is the basic message I find lacking in this otherwise interesting recent piece by Michael Kimmelman in The New York Times. He is right, of course, about the power of place and especially about the importance of public space to politics. I can hardly dispute that sort of claim given what I've written here in the past. But I think Kimmelman neglects the conflict and contestation involved in how political agents must occupy and act out their freedom in public. The Al Jazeera video depicts just that process.

Rethinking 'Humanitarian' Action

"Surely what is needed . . . is an end to the evasion of politics, and the attempt to substitute humanitarian action for it. . . . Humanitarianism is . . . an often noble enterprise . . . but it was never meant to topple tyrants, end wars, redistribute wealth or solve political conflicts. Humanitarianism has been burdened with tasks it cannot accomplish, which is part of what makes the present moment both unutterably sad and terrifying."

That is among the provocative points Susie Linfield makes in this typically provocative essay. The dichotomy that traps us as we think about how best to respond to systematic social-political-economic dislocation of various sorts consists on the one hand in the aspiration to a neutral, moralistic brand of liberal humanitarianism that, at best, treats the symptoms of man-made mayhem and, on the other hand, the use of military force, brute and blunt as it is.

Among the problematic aspects of the essay is Linfield's near wholesale misunderstanding of Hannah Arendt's analysis of compassion and its limits. That is not merely a quibble on the part of a political theorist. As rightly points out: "It is a sign of the great distance between Arendt's time and ours that compassion – whose objective form is humanitarian action – has become not only politically relevant but politically central." Actually, what institutionalized compassion does is precisely what Arendt thinks it does; it subverts the space of politics, introducing moralism for political action animated by political impulses like solidarity. It does this not just because it is an emotion, but because it undermines our ability to think in terms of large numbers. While Arendt makes a conceptual argument to this effect, her views are - as I've noted here - sustained by recent research by cognitive psychologists.

Linfield directs us to the important task of imagining new forms of politics, forms that might be effective in protecting the vulnerable and holding perpetrators, individual and collective, to account. That is a huge task one that demands not just that we cease evading politics, but work at re-configuring it by re-conceptualizing the terms on which we approach others. It seems to me that jettisoning the politics of compassion and its institutional forms is an important first step. The picture of humanitarianism and its failings that Linfield paints seems to leave us no alternative.

Political Space

"Jefferson ... knew, however dimly, that the Revolution, while it had given freedom to the people, had failed to provide a space where this freedom could be exercised." ~ Hannah Arendt

I am late commenting on this - the last several weeks have been especially hectic. So, while I had heard a bit about the police mis-conduct shown here, I had not see this video. You can read the local Gannett take on the episode here and here.* Regardless of whether one agrees with the kids, there is no excuse for the behavior of the police shown here. None.

The obvious, immediate problem here is that Rochester police, like those elsewhere, feel entitled to beat people with impunity. But there is a deeper matter at issue too. Where is the public space for the exercise of freedoms? If that space is defined by club wielding, uniformed agents of the state, we are in trouble. So, we are in trouble.
__________
* You can find a report here from the local PBS station on the subsequent public hearing on the episode.

Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt is, in my estimation, among a small handful of truly profound 20th century political theorists. Maybe Weber, Dewey, Rawls, Foucault, and Habermas are in the same league. The picture at right is Arendt at the University of Chicago in the mid-1960s. In any case, she was born 14 October 1906 and I missed noting the anniversary this past week. That is ironic because I actually was reading her essay "What is Freedom?" that day in preparation for discussing it in my freshman political theory course.

There are two aspects of the essay that especially appeal to me. The first is her insistence that freedom requires public space in which we can interact and speak. And this leads her to note that in our world freedom is precarious precisely due to a lack of such a public world.

"Moreover, whenever the man-made world does not become the scene of action and speech - as in despotically ruled communities which banish their subjects into the narrowness of the home and thus prevent the rise of a public realm - freedom has no worldly reality. Without a politically guaranteed public realm, freedom lacks the worldly space to make its appearance. To be sure, it may still dwell in men's hearts as desire or will or hope or yearning; but the human heart, as we all know, is a very dark place, and whatever goes on in its obscurity can hardly be called demonstrable fact. Freedom as demonstrable fact and politics coincide and are related to each other like two sides of the same matter."

On Arendt's view, freedom is not a characteristic of thought or conscience or choice, but of action, where the latter, when free, involves the capacity "to call something into being which did not exist before, which was not given, not even as an object of cognition or imagination, and which therefore, strictly speaking, could not be known." It is, in other words, essential to our ability to make (although that is a word Arendt herself would not allow in this context) and sustain the world. This sounds as though Arendt would see politics as akin to art and she does in a somewhat unsatisfying way. She insists that politics resembles the performing arts, but not the creative arts. That is because, on her view, the former require continues performance if they are exist, while the latter reify thought and action in some object. This, it seems to me, is a mistaken - overly narrow - view of the creative arts and that, if we were to turn to Dewey and see that it is a mistake to conflate art and its objects. (This is a lesson, as I noted here, that we need to keep in mind if we want to think of photography and its uses instead of about photographs.) That, of course, would require an argument that I am not prepared to make here.

The second theme in the essay that I find appealing comes toward the very end where Arendt makes the following comments on the miraculous dimension of free action.

"Every act, seen from the perspective not of the agent but of the process in whose framework it occurs and whose automatism it interrupts, is a 'miracle' - that is, something which could not be expected. If it is true that action and beginning are essentially the same, it follows that a capacity for performing miracles must likewise be within the range of human faculties. This sounds stranger than it actually is. It is in the very nature of every new beginning that it breaks into the world as an 'infinite improbability,' and yet it is precisely this infinitely improbable which actually constitutes the very texture of everything we call real."

Having spent extended parts of my childhood in Catholic schools, I am almost viscerally averse to talk of miracles. Add to that the recent vogue for such talk among new age types and I'm usually ready, when someone mentions miracles, to back my way toward the door so that I might escape without taking my eyes off the crazy folks. That said, I think it is important to be able to think seriously about the truly unexpected both in art and in politics. What else, after all, do we have in mind when we think about surprise and creativity and innovation and reform?

Game theorists, for example, talk of unforeseen contingencies - occurrences to which we do not merely assign minuscule probabilities, but that we truly do not anticipate at all. It turns out, unsurprisingly, that one cannot exclude such events from formal models. That is part of what makes them useful and provocative. Similarly, pragmatists rightly stress the indeterminacy of social and political interaction in all sorts of ways. Roberto Mangabeira Unger, about whom I've posted here several times, speaks of the place of miracles in ways that echo Arendt too. Where those affinities might lead us, though, is a subject for another post. I was interested only in noting that Arendt directs us to ponder the same difficult subjects.