Citizens Without Frontiers by Isin Engin F

Author:Isin, Engin F.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2012-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Beginning something new

Arendt starts from the position that action – as distinguished from not only contemplation but also work and labour – enables human beings to perform their agency, which involves bringing something new into the world whose outcomes are unpredictable. For her, if humans were reproducible repetitions of the same whose essence was predictable, we would not need the concept of action.15 Unlike Deleuze, Foucault or Bourdieu then Arendt differentiates action from conduct and makes action the beginning of something new as her sustained focus. Unfortunately, Arendt relates this capacity to begin something new to natality. For Arendt, each human shares the condition of natality, which gives us the capacity to initiate something new because each human being is born with the inherent capacity to come into the world as new.16 I am unconvinced about the usefulness of associating this capacity with natality rather than seeing it as a capacity that we historically develop. At any rate, what is significant here is that both speech and action, or more accurately, speech as action reveals this capacity and discloses each human being in the presence of and in relation to others.17 I like the idea of action as the disclosure of ourselves that we neither anticipate nor determine. Arendt reserves the term ‘action’ for the actualization of this capacity. To act then means to take initiative, to begin and to set something new into motion. Because humans are newcomers and beginners by virtue of birth, they are always prompted into action, into disclosing themselves to others. Arendt calls this capacity, or what it enables human beings to initiate, a ‘miracle’. However, that newcomers bring something new into being is a miracle not because it is mystical but because it is unexpected and unpredicted. As Arendt puts it, ‘not because we superstitiously believe in miracles, but because human beings, whether or not they know it, as long as they can act, are capable of achieving, and constantly do achieve, the improbable and unpredictable’.18 Each human is capable of performing the unexpected and it is only through this performance that each human being is able to disclose himself or herself as human.

The fact that man is capable of action means that the unexpected can be expected from him, that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable. And this again is possible only because each man is unique, so that with each birth something uniquely new comes into the world.19

What an action reveals or discloses is not a being that already exists but a being that becomes through this disclosure or revelation. From this brief description, we may conclude that Arendt holds a subjectivist view of the agent but that is wrong. That she starts with this capacity does not mean that it expresses a sovereign subject capable of commanding a will and controlling the outcomes of its actions. We shall see shortly how Arendt addresses this but now let us take a step back and consider why it is important

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