It's Hannah Arendt time again here on Blog Time Passing, as I repost a Quote of the Week entry that was previously posted on May 13th over on the Hannah Arendt Center's blog. My previous contributions, in reverse chronological order, are Secondhand Gun Smoke, The Deprivations of Privacy, History and Freedom, We Create the Conditions that Condition Us, Charlie Chaplin and Hannah Arendt, and see also an earlier post entitled Arendt Come Due. And thanks again to Bridget Hollenback for providing the illustrations.
"There is perhaps no clearer testimony to
the loss of the public realm in the modern age than the almost complete
loss of authentic concern with immortality, a loss somewhat
overshadowed by the simultaneous loss of the metaphysical concern with
eternity."
-Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
Hannah Arendt was one of the first to remark upon the loss of the
public realm, or what Jürgen Habermas called the public sphere. As
indicated by the terms realm and sphere, along with related phrases such as public space and public sector,
we are referring here to a kind of environment, or as Arendt puts it,
"the world itself, in so far as it is common to all of us and
distinguished from our privately owned place in it" (p. 52). The private
realm, the subject of a previous post of mine (The Deprivations of
Privacy) is defined in relation (and opposition) to the public, but both
are differentiated from the natural environment according to Arendt.
Both are human artifacts, human inventions:
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. (p.
52)
The table is an apt metaphor, as it has the connotation of civilized
discourse, and a willingness to sit down for peaceful negotiation.
Indeed, it is much more than a metaphor, as the table does create a
shared space for individuals, a medium, if you will, around which
they can communicate. But the table also keeps individuals separate
from one another, establishing a buffer zone that allows for a sense of
safety in the company of individuals who might otherwise be
threatening. Sitting at a table restricts the possibilities of sudden
movement, providing some assurance that the person seated across from
you will not suddenly spring at you with sword or knife in hand,
especially if both parties keep their hands visible on the table top. No
wonder, then, that as the practice of sitting around a table for a meal
emerges in the Middle Ages, it becomes the focal point for what Norbert
Elias refers to as the civilizing process.
The table is a medium, an in-between, as Arendt puts it, and
each medium in its own way serves as a means by which individuals
connect and relate to one another, and also are separated and kept apart
from one another. In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan
expressed the same idea in saying that all media, meaning all
technologies and human innovations, are extensions of some aspect of
individuals, but at the same time are amputations. As I have explained
elsewhere, the medium that extends us into the world comes between us
and the world, and in doing so becomes our world. Or as I like to put
it, with apologies to McLuhan, the medium is the membrane.
The public realm then is a shared human environment, a media environment. As Arendt explains,
everything that appears in public can be
seen and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity. For
us, appearance—something that is being seen and heard by others as well
as by ourselves—constitutes reality. (p. 50)
Paul Watzlawick has argued that our reality is constructed through
our communication, rather than mere reflected or represented by our
messages. And this means that our reality is shaped by our means of
communication, our media. It is through publicity that we create the
public realm. And for the public realm to exist, there must also be the
possibility for some communication to take place privately, in a
context where it cannot be seen and heard by everybody, where there are
barriers to people's perception and their access to information, what
Erving Goffman referred to as the back region.
The public realm is not a media environment we typically associate
with tribal societies, where the distinction between public and private
is, for the most part, non-existent. Rather, it is strongly tied to the
city as a human environment (and a medium of communication in its own
right). Lewis Mumford insightfully observed that cities are a type of
container technology, indeed the container of containers, and
what they contain includes great concentrations of population. As
settlements evolved into the first urban centers in the ancient world,
they gave rise to the first true crowds and mobs, and also to audiences
made up of people who do not necessarily know one another, or have
strong social ties to each other.
These new kinds of audiences required a new form of communication:
public address. They required new kinds of physical environments: the
agora, the forum, the marketplace. And they required new forms of
education: the art of rhetoric.
The invention of writing is intimately bound up in all of these
developments. Without reasonably well-developed systems of notation,
human populations were not able to handle the complexity of large
populations. In tribal societies, as population increases, groups split
up in order to keep their affairs manageable. Writing, as a container
for language, whose primary form is the spoken word, develops side by
side with the city as container, and allows for the control and
coordination of large populations and diverse activities. And writing,
in allowing language to be viewed and reviewed, made it possible to
refine the art of public address, to study rhetoric and instruct others
in the techniques of oratory, as did the Sophists in ancient Greece. It
is no accident that the introduction of the Greek alphabet was followed
by the first forms of study, including rhetoric and grammar, and by the
first forms of democracy.
Writing also has the peculiar effect of introducing the idea of the
individual, of breaking people apart from their tribal, group identity.
The ability to take one's thoughts, write them down, and observe them
from the outside, made it possible to separate the knower from the known, as Eric Havelock put it, which also separated individuals from their traditions.
Written law, beginning with Hammurabi and Moses, took judicial
matters out of the concrete realm of proverbs and parables, and
reasoning by analogy, opened the door to the view that everyone is
equal, as an individual, before the law. The fact that literacy also
facilitated increasingly more abstract modes of thought also was of
great importance, but the simple act of reading and writing alone, in
isolation, had much to do with the genesis of individualism.
The origin of the public realm is closely tied to the medium of the
written word, in highly significant but limited ways. Script gave us the
civic public, rooted in rhetoric, but it was the printing revolution in
early modern Europe that made the public intro a national, mass
phenomenon. As McLuhan noted in his preface to The Gutenberg Galaxy,
Printing from movable types created a
quite unexpected new environment—it created the PUBLIC. Manuscript
technology did not have the intensity or power of extension necessary to
create publics on a national scale. What we have called "nations" in
recent centuries did not, and could not, precede the advent of Gutenberg
technology any more than they can survive the advent of electric
circuitry with its power of totally involving all people in all other
people. (p. ii)
A reading public is quite different from a listening public, as
readers are separated in time and space from one another, and this form
of mediation also had the effect of making individualism a ruling
ideology. And yes, Habermas did place a great deal of emphasis on
people gathering in public places like coffee shops to discuss and
debate the issues of the day, but they did so based on what they read in
print media such as newspapers, pamphlets, and the like. Moreover,
historian Elizabeth Eisenstein explained in The Printing Press as an Agent of Change,
the printers' shops were the first places that people gathered for such
intellectual exchanges, long before they gravitated to the coffee shops
and taverns. The point is that the content of these discussions were
based on typographic media, the mindset of the discussants was shaped by
print literacy, and both were situated within the print media
environment. Within such an environment, a population of individuals
could gain common access to ideas and opinions through print media,
which in turn could provide the basis for political action; in this way
publics came into being.
Publics were formed by publicity, and publicity was achieved through
publication. As much as books, pamphlets, catalogs, calendars,
periodicals, and all manner of ephemera were the products of the
printing press, so too, as McLuhan observed, was the reading public.
Print technology gave us our first form of mass communication,
characterized by wide and relatively rapid dissemination of multiple,
identical copies of the same text, a democratizing process, as Walter
Benjamin observed.
But printing also created a new sense of immortality, of the author's
words living on through the ages, and of posterity as the ultimate
judge. Elizabeth Eisenstein explains that the very multiplication of
texts, however perishable any single copy might be, established what she
referred to as the preservative powers of print far beyond
anything previously known. This idea of immortality goes hand in hand
with the rise of a new kind of historical consciousness, which also
emerged out of print culture.
Eternity, by way of contrast, is situated outside of historical time, within what Mircea Eliade calls sacred time. It is a time that looks back towards the moment of creation or a golden age. Through ritual, we can step out of the profane time of everyday life, and in enacting the myth of eternal return
enter the sacred time that intersects with all of history—in this sense
always a part of it and yet at the same time apart from it.
Traditional cultures look backward to creation or the golden age as a
time superior to the present, a time they strive to reclaim. Oral
cultures are particularly associated with a cyclical understanding of
time. The invention of writing makes possible first chronology, then
historical narrative, and this opens the door to the idea of progress.
The shift begins with the biblical narrative in ancient Israel, and the
secular history writing of ancient Greece and Rome. But a complete
reversal in orientation from looking to the past as the ideal towards
anticipating the future as a continual process of getting better,
perhaps culminating in utopia, is closely associated with the printing
revolution and the modern world it gave rise to. This is, in turn,
superseded by a present-centered orientation brought on by the
electronic media, as I have discussed in On the Binding Biases of Time.
The instantaneity and immediacy of electronic communication not only
moves our focus from history and futurity to the present moment, but it
translates the remembered past and the anticipated future into the
present tense, the now of the computer program and digital simulation.
Arendt's insight that the loss of a concern with immortality is
intimately bound up with the loss of the public realm implies a common
denominator, specifically the electronic media environment that has
superseded the typographic media environment. If literacy and print go
hand in hand with citizenship, civics, and the public realm, what
happens when these media are overshadowed by electronic technologies,
from the telegraph and wireless to radio and television now to the
internet and mobile technology?
We still use the word public of course, but we have seen a
great blurring of the boundaries between public and private, the
continuing erosion of privacy but also a loss of the expectation that
dress, behavior, and communication ought to be different when we are in a
public place, and that there are rules and obligations that go along
with being a part of a public. And we have experienced a loss of our
longstanding sense of individualism, replaced by an emphasis on
personalization; a loss of citizenship based on equality, replaced by
group identity based on grievance and all manner of neo-tribalism; a
loss of traditional notions of character and personal integrity,
replaced by various forms of identity construction via online profiles,
avatars, and the like; the loss of separate public and private selves,
replaced by affiliations with different lifestyles and media
preferences.
As consumers, members of audiences, and participants in the online
world, we live for the moment, and we do so with disastrous results,
economically, ethically, and ecologically. Arendt suggests that, "under
modern conditions, it is indeed so unlikely that anybody should
earnestly aspire to an earthly immortality that we probably are
justified in thinking it is nothing but vanity" (p. 56). Along the same
lines, Daniel Boorstin in The Image argued that the hero,
characterized by greatness, has been replaced by the celebrity,
characterized by publicity, famous for appearing on the media rather
than for any accomplishments of historical significance. Heroes were
immortal. Celebrities become famous seemingly overnight, and then just
as quickly fade from collective consciousness. Heroes, as Boorstin
describes them, were known through print media; celebrities make up the
content of our audiovisual and electronic media. These are the role
models that people pattern their lives after.
Arendt explains that a public realm " cannot be erected for one
generation and planned for the living only; it must transcend the life
span of mortal men" (p. 55). And she goes on to explain,
It is the publicity of the public realm
which can absorb and make shine through the centuries whatever men may
want to save from the natural ruin of time. Through many ages before
us—but now not any more—men entered the public realm because they wanted
something of their own or something they had in common with others to
be more permanent than their earthly lives. (p. 55)
Without this concern with a public realm that extends across history
from the past into the future, what becomes of political action based on
the common good, rather than private interests?
With the loss of any concern with immortality, have we witnessed not
merely the erosion, but the irrevocable death of the public realm?
And perhaps most importantly of all, without the existence of a
public, can there still exist, in something more than name only, a republic?
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