Textual Conspiracies by Martel James;

Author:Martel, James;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Hannah Arendt: Appearance versus Representation

In looking at Arendt's work on the relationship between politics and materiality, we immediately come across a series of ambivalences on her part. As already indicated, Arendt is highly suspicious (as is Benjamin) of human intentionality, and more specifically in her case, of the human will. For Arendt, the will—at least in the form that we currently experience it—is a modern and generally pernicious phenomenon; as we will see further, for Arendt, the will denies the reality of human plurality (and hence politics) in favor of its own internal phantasms.

In order to bypass the will, Arendt seeks a kind of perfect and political exteriority, what could be called a “politics of appearance.” Here each of us exists as “an appearance among appearances,” a cipher that evokes our condition as existing amid other people.4 When Arendt speaks of appearance in this way, she does not mean our actual physical presence before others so much as the Greek idea of dokei moi (“it appears to me”), that is to say, the way that human beings intrude onto other people's interiority (and will), bringing in a perspective or appearance that is not within the other person's control. This is not so much representation for Arendt as “presentation.” While the “materiality” of the other's appearance to us is based more on how we see them than what they actually (ontologically) are (hence she speaks of “appearance” vs. something like “being”), such a seeing does not come under the control of the interior mind or will and hence is not re-presented so much as just seen or noted by the self.

Arendt's conception of action is deeply tied to the understanding of politics that comes out of her interest in appearance. In her view action causes us to “appear” to ourselves and to others in ways that are unexpected; action thus rescues us from our inner phantasms, delivering us to political life. It seems here as if Arendt has indeed sought out an external, material source of personhood as a counterweight to our own subjectivity.

Yet, as we will see further, even as Arendt makes these arguments, we also find her often holding back from a full embrace of this vision, compromising with many of the internal and subjective aspects of the social that in her view threaten the vision of politics that is so dear to her. At the heart of her ambivalence lies the troubling question of representation. On the one hand, representation determines how we relate to one another, both ethically and politically—we see this for example in Arendt's notion of “representative thinking.”5 Yet at the same time representation also is tainted by our subjective phantasms; the will is a representative faculty. It is tempting to say that Arendt seeks to dispense with representation altogether, that she prefers, as already suggested, “appearance” as a pure marker of presence, a kind of non- or antirepresentative understanding of human interactivity.6 And yet, as we will see, Arendt is more complicated than this.

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