Amy Sillman. Great Job.First Thought:
Arendt is concerned with what she believes to be the rise of the social; the relegation of previously public affairs to the private realm and household matters to the public. She goes back to the Greek polis, a space where she felt real freedom could exist in action and speech.
'Action' in this sense is more than any single outcome or result. It is a space of coming together, an enlarged sphere of community where individuals can relate to each other and interact. Action leads to unpredictability and thus diverges from what Arendt sees as 'behavior', which as part of the rule by no-man, or modern bureaucracy, orders and conforms. Although standards for behavior constantly change, along with it laws, beliefs etc, the structure of modern society incorporates and enforces behavior. We create, but the products of our theories and technology also shape us. Freedom, plurality and solidarity are sacrificed to life necessities, comfort, abundance, control, production, behavior; this is the rise of the social. Action, so seen, is the freeing of human activity, where thinking and speech are tied to experience, community, spontaneity and unpredictability. Re-connecting thought-speech-action is Arendt's return to logos. It is not limited to a space or time, but is ephemeral, temporally and spatially existent only in the coming together of people in freedom; “Wherever you go, you will be a polis”. It allows greatness to come forth, for people to exceed themselves, to express themselves with courage and integrity, and to put themselves forward to be judged by others, though this must not be mistaken with modern notions of success, through wealth and power. Rather, it goes against material and calculable notions, arising “only where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities ”. The polis can be taken as the space of appearance, “where I appear to others as others appear to me, where men exist not merely like other living or inanimate things, but to make their appearance explicitly.”
Another Thought:
The rise of the social seems overly restricted in its being the necessities of life. I still don't understand why she used this analogy; the great moral problems of our age are also encompassed in this sphere; power relations, subjugation, equal rights. The idea that the necessities of the private sphere have dominated politics is perhaps more about our becoming producers (not work, but labour) and consumers, holding jobs simply to get by or to fund our lifestyles. I think that her space of appearance is incredibly important and pertinent, as are her distinctions between labour and work, public and private (in the sense of freedom being seen as an inner domain, individuated and isolated, rather than a part of the public sphere). Perhaps I misunderstood her conception of the rise of the social, but it seemed that its separation from the political could only occur when there was a space of equality in which we could be free to act and speak. Since these social issues are political issues and we have not found a way to appear to each other as equals, this separation seems premature and limiting. The fundamental problem that she raises is that our society is one of consumers and producers, but not makers or actors. The rule of sanitized bureaucracy, the conformism and the schism in action and thought are problems of the rule of knowledge over learning and calculable success over ephemeral excellence.
Well, I was thinking of an analogy and I now think I understand what Arendt is talking about with the rise of the social. I was thinking of the ancient gardener and his tending to his plants, who respects the seed and nurtures it into its natural end (Heideggarian, of course). Then I thought about the removal of the foodspace from our lives, whereby mostly people do not live near the site of food production, it is no longer near to them. Food, sustenance, become necessities that must be organised, arranged, transported, bought. They become part of the city's responsibility to its citizens, securing their well-being. The care of the basic necessities, food and shelter, in bigger societies, falls to the State and later, corporations, to bureaucracy, to no-man. The concerns of the bureaucracy in a modern technological society are to provide this care in an efficient and cost-effective way, with the least imposition on monetary resources. This then becomes the political agenda, it becomes the function of the bureaucracy and the politicians, thereby dominating public life. We are shaped by society as much as we shape it. We fall into line with regards to our priorities, they become the same as the State's. With enough time passed, we no longer equate our ideas of humanity, of what it is to be human, with the public sphere. Rather, the public sphere is of practicality and how it is to be human; we become our own means and there are no views toward ends, in the sense of the fundamental questions toward the meaning of life. When we are so thoroughly obscured, we can start to see humans as impositions on our means; immigrants pose threats to jobs and so we see them as "illegal aliens" as if they were an illicit species, rather than our own kind. And yet, we still manage to enjoy cheaply made goods from third-world countries, where we are aware that no job security or fair wage policies exist. We are stuck in a selfish paradox, whereby we look only to our basic needs rather than asking bigger questions, polis-type questions, of what it means to be human, of what matters most, of whether a life of consumption is worth someone else's life of near-slavery.
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