Amor Mundi

Action and Interaction

01-24-2016

By Hans Teerds

"Action and speech create a space between the participants, which can find its proper location almost any time and anywhere. It is the space of appearance in the widest sense of the word, namely, the space where I appear to others as they appear to me, where men exist not merely like other living or inanimate things but make their appearance explicitly."

-- Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

Hannah Arendt was, as far as I know, the first to introduce the idea of the public realm in a political-philosophical context. She introduced the concept in The Human Condition in 1958. A few years later, in 1962, the philosopher Jürgen Habermas also investigated the idea, this time in the German language with the term Öffentlichkeit. According to the Turkish-American political theorist Sheyla Benhabib, a little reference in Habermas' first chapter reveals he did know about Arendt’s attempt. In fact, their investigations were totally different, a fact which came to the fore in the English translation of Habermas’ book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989). Between brackets, the publishing of this translation caused a wave of pessimistic reflections within the American discourses on philosophy and political theory (with titles like The Phantom Public Sphere) as well in architectural theory (characterized by narratives like The End of Public Space). What certainly is remarkable is that the translators chose to use the term "public sphere" as a translation of Öffentlichkeit. Here we recall that Arendt in her own translation to German uses Öffentliche Raum. This choice reveals that Arendt's concept is at least partially more spatial and tangible than Habermas’, whose public sphere seems more ephemeral. As a frame of reference, the quotation above captures the spatiality of Arendt's thinking.

I do not mean to dismiss the perspective of Habermas. (And for a non-philosopher like me, this is a bit of a tricky trajectory.) Nevertheless, drawing on my observations in the preceding paragraph, I want to stress why I would challenge the impact of Habermas on architectural theory. Like Arendt, Habermas (re)discovers public space and the public sphere as a central question of modernity, and he connects the idea of the public sphere to different aspects of humankind's activities. The difference, however, is that Arendt distinguishes between three activities--labour, work and action--while Habermas makes a distinction between only two: labour and interaction. The leaving out of ‘work’ is telling, I would suggest.

In previous posts, I've written on how Arendt argues that the things produced by work is important for the durability and reliability of the public realm. But let me focus here on this second difference, that of action and inter-action.

[caption id="attachment_17346" align="alignleft" width="300"] Jürgen Habermas' book Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft, which translates to Structural Transformation of the Public: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Source: Amazon.de)[/caption]

Habermas’s emphasis on inter-action is to be seen as the root of his concept of ‘communicative action’ that he coined later in Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (1981). Society consists of a network of interactions, he claims therein, whose aim it is to gain understanding between its inhabitants. In this perspective, he argues that the public sphere is devoted to communication and is shaped by the media. The public sphere according to Habermas’ analysis finds its origin in the rise of the printing press. But it nonetheless owes its decay to similarly revolutionary changes in media. We might reason that the public sphere has in some ways deteriorated as a result of the internet and social media, for instance.

Habermas begins his analysis with the availability of newspapers, which evoked a ‘virtual community of readers’. Virtual in this perspective can be read in two directions: first, of course, as all the readers of the newspaper, who distinctively but nevertheless together read the paper; and second, per Habermas' emphasis, as a more articulated form of this community, namely the (small) groups of people that gathered in the salon, the coffeehouse, and other places where people could gather in order to discuss the actualities. These groups' ability to gather of course depended upon their available spare time and the accommodations of the spaces where they gathered, not to mention the newspaper, which offered them things to discuss. These ‘public spaces’ of the salon, coffeehouse and so on are thus spaces of communication. But Habermas’ main focus is not upon these spaces of gathering; it is upon the media.

For me, there is a major difference with Arendt’s concept of action: the media is not only impersonal but also non-spatial. The difference with Arendt’s concept is evidently important in respect to an architectural exploration of the phenomenon. First, action is linked to the actor, and since action only matters if seen by others, which in turn are able to re-act upon that action, it also immediately is bound to (public) space. Action thus is bound to the public space, where others can see and act accordingly. Although Arendt never immediately addressed the actual city-scapes and public spaces, it is not by chance that Arendt chose a spatial metaphor in her description of this ‘sphere’. Those terms evoke action, movement, people that do something. They appear in tangible ways in a matter of time and space.

[caption id="attachment_17345" align="aligncenter" width="531"] Jürgen Habermas during a discussion in the Munich School of Philosophy (Source: Wikipedia)[/caption]

Action, one can state, is quite the opposite of communication: it is both a personal and a spatial activity. It is the difference between the letter to the editor and the actual talk, between a comment on Facebook and a real conversation in a café. Action always requires a space, locally grounded, where people meet, act, and of course also interact, although we could perhaps more appropriately call it "re-act". In other words, the first distinction between the inter-action of Habermas and Arendt’s action, briefly stated, is that action is bound to concrete space in a much more tangible way. It is not dominated by the actualities that are offered by the media--from newspaper to Facebook--but by what actually happens in space. Action only takes places ‘out there’, so to say, in space, among peers.

Although I am keen to distance Arendt from Habermas, it of course has to be said that her notion incorporates Habermas’ inter-action, since Arendt values speech as intrinsic part of action. It nevertheless is important for our perspective upon public space that Arendt's notion of action in its very root offers more implications for real space. Interaction can become virtual, but action can’t. Action requires a real stage, whereas interaction can do with a virtual stage.