Amor Mundi 2/8/15

02-09-2015

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

Creative Entrepreneurship

The artist, Hannah Arendt wrote, was the last person who could resist the dominant role of laborer and produce works that transfigured the everyday into the extraordinary. To do so, she saw, required the artist to exist outside of society as a conscious pariah, in solitude, where the artist could acquire his or her unique and original thoughts about the world. Bill Deresiewicz has an essay in The Atlantic on the transformation of artists into creative entrepreneurs. "Creative entrepreneurship, to start with what is most apparent, is far more interactive, at least in terms of how we understand the word today, than the model of the artist-as-genius, turning his back on the world, and even than the model of the artist as professional, operating within a relatively small and stable set of relationships. The operative concept today is the network, along with the verb that goes with it, networking.... What we see in the new paradigm--in both the artist's external relationships and her internal creative capacity--is what we see throughout the culture: the displacement of depth by breadth. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? No doubt some of both, in a ratio that's yet to be revealed." But Deresiewicz clearly has his worries: "It's hard to believe that the new arrangement will not favor work that's safer: more familiar, formulaic, user-friendly, eager to please--more like entertainment, less like art. Artists will inevitably spend a lot more time looking over their shoulder, trying to figure out what the customer wants rather than what they themselves are seeking to say. The nature of aesthetic judgment will itself be reconfigured. 'No more gatekeepers,' goes the slogan of the Internet apostles. Everyone's opinion, as expressed in Amazon reviews and suchlike, carries equal weight--the democratization of taste. Judgment rested with the patron, in the age of the artisan. In the age of the professional, it rested with the critic, a professionalized aesthete or intellectual. In the age of the genius, which was also the age of avant-gardes, of tremendous experimental energy across the arts, it largely rested with artists themselves. 'Every great and original writer,' Wordsworth said, 'must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.' But now we have come to the age of the customer, who perforce is always right."   

What Do We Hold in Common?

The common world, that world of appearance we share amidst are meaningful differences, is ever more fragile. In her book The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt worries that we lose faith in anything true or great that could unite plural individuals in a common world. She sees that the loss of a concern with immortality and with acts, deeds, and works that deserve to be remembered would deprive us of a shared world. All politics, Arendt writes, demands transcendence in the sense that we step beyond our solipsistic experiences and enter a world we share with others. Pursuing this Arendtian theme, Michael W. Clune in the LA Review of Books explores the effort of some contemporary art to cultivate the experience of "mere appearance," appearances so fleeting that they resist any shared commonality. Such art celebrates the radically individual transcendental experience against the transcendence of a common world: "Here is the fact: Something is wrong with the world. There is a fundamental flaw in society. Relations between people seem to have something wrong with them. Something ... off. Sometimes, when I want to share something with you, I realize that my experience has an unsharable dimension. I realize that we encounter each other only by peering across the thick boundary of our social personas. I don't know how to fix this problem, but I don't like it. I can only meet other people on the terrain of a common world that seems too heavy, too alien, too uncomfortable, too cold. Sometimes I protest by looking away, by watching the part of my experience that none of you can touch." For Clune, the effort of contemporary artists to dwell in mere appearance is, but is not only, a "turn away from the world."

Praising Cheap Pop Culture

Ta-Nehisi Coates discusses the importance of popular art that's cheap to produce: "One reason why I still enjoy books, including comic books, is that there's still more room for a transgressive diversity. If Greg Pak wants to create an Amadeus Cho, he doesn't have to worry about whether America is ready for a Korean-American protagonist. Or rather, he doesn't have to put millions of dollars behind it. I don't know what that means to a young, Asian-American comic books fan. But when I was eight, the fact that Storm could exist--as she was, and in a way that I knew the rest of society did not accept--meant something. Outside of hip-hop, it was in comics that I most often found the aesthetics and wisdom of my world reflected. Monica Rambeau was my first Captain Marvel. James Rhodes was the first Iron Man I knew...one reason I'm always cautious about the assumption that everything is improved by turning it into a movie is that the range of possibility necessarily shrinks. I'd frankly be shocked if we ever see a Storm, in all her fullness and glory, in a film."

The Right to be Forgotten

If you carry a cell-phone, use the internet, or walk down the street, you abandon your expectation of privacy. Even in your home, your life is increasingly transparent. There is no place to hide from the bright light of the public. But in Europe, unlike in the United States, there is an effort to think about the right to have your private failures publicly forgotten. Heather Roff explores how this might work. "Last year, The European Court of Justice ruled in Google vs. Costeja that European citizens have the right, under certain circumstances, to request search engines like Google, to remove links that contain personal information about them. The Court held that in instances where data is 'inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant or excessive' individuals may request the information to be erased and delinked from the search engines. This 'right to be forgotten' is a right that is intended to support and complement an individual's privacy rights. It is not absolute, but must be balanced 'against other fundamental rights, such as freedom of expression and of the media' (paragraph 85 of the ruling). In the case of Costeja, he asked that a 1998 article in a Spanish newspaper be delinked from his name, for in that article, information pertaining to an auction of his foreclosed home appeared. Mr. Costeja subsequently paid the debt, and so on these grounds, the Court ruled that the link to his information was no longer relevant. The case did not state that information regarding Mr. Costeja has to be erased, or that the newspaper article eliminated, merely that the search engine result did not need to make this particular information 'ubiquitous.' The idea is that in an age of instantaneous and ubiquitous information about private details, individuals have a right to try to balance their personal privacy against other rights, such as freedom of speech." Privacy, and why it matters, will be the theme of the Hannah Arendt Center's 8^th annual conference this October 15-16^th. Save the Date.

With Liberty and Justice for All

Slavoj Zizek considers the possibilities of solidarity in the shadow of neoliberalism and colonialism: "It was relatively easy to identify with the Charlie Hebdo journalists, but it would have been much more difficult to announce: 'We are all from Baga!' (For those who don't know: Baga is a small town in the north-east of Nigeria where Boko Haram executed two thousand people.) The name 'Boko Haram' can be roughly translated as 'Western education is forbidden,' specifically the education of women. How to account for the weird fact of a massive sociopolitical movement whose main aim is the hierarchic regulation of the relationship between the sexes? Why do Muslims who were undoubtedly exposed to exploitation, domination and other destructive and humiliating aspects of colonialism, target in their response the best part (for us, at least) of the Western legacy, our egalitarianism and personal freedoms, including the freedom to mock all authorities? One answer is that their target is well chosen: the liberal West is so unbearable because it not only practises exploitation and violent domination, but presents this brutal reality in the guise of its opposite: freedom, equality and democracy."

The Great Email Silence

Lucy Kellaway explores the excruciating and unbounded silence of unanswered emails. "Silence is not just a response to job searches, but to pitches, invitations, proposed meetings, memos, general requests--or to anything sent by email. From this non-communication everyone loses, though some more than others. For the purveyors of silence, not replying may be neither polite nor efficient, but is vital for survival. Every day I fail to reply to dozens of messages as with so much dross coming in, silence is the only way of staying sane. But such sanity on one side breeds insanity on the other. The jobseeker is demented by the silence--the certainty of rejection, he told me, would have been kind by comparison. On any given day I am anywhere between mildly and debilitatingly anxious about why assorted people have failed to reply to my messages. Was the silence that greeted a slightly cheeky email due to disgust at its fresh tone? When I sent an email containing the outline of a column idea in it, was the resulting silence dismay? Or disagreement? Or something else entirely? What is so distracting about silence on email is that it is impossible to fathom. When you are speaking to someone, you can see whether they are struck dumb from amazement, disapproval or boredom. But emails give no clues. Has the person even seen your message? Are they deliberately ignoring you? Are they disgusted? Busy? Out of battery? Or could it be that--as often happens to me--they have read the message on their mobile without reading glasses to hand, and by the time they have got their glasses the moment has passed." Kellaway has some excellent insights into how and when to nag or follow up on email. But no techniques will eradicate the nausea of email overload or the anxiety of unanswered emails.

The Humor in the Crowd

Ian Crouch lauds new Larry Wilmore's Comedy Central fake news show, The Nightly Report, as he chronicles its growing pains: "The show has included the kinds of voices that don't normally get much of a fair airing on Comedy Central, or in the wider Jon Stewart produced or inspired universe of political comedy. Last Wednesday, the conservative radio host David Webb could be seen defending the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision. The night before, an anti-vaccine activist named Zoey O'Toole argued that immunization should be more about individual choice than public safety. This week, the Baptist pastor Michel Faulkner talked about his opposition to gay marriage. None of these arguments were particularly persuasive or, to the average Comedy Central viewer, likely even plausible, but they were at least freely expressed, as part of the show's nightly unscripted discussion between Wilmore and a changing four-person panel made up of journalists, politicians, activists, and comedians. One of the trademarks of Comedy Central's political comedy has been its insularity. The sets of Stewart and Colbert were safe spaces for liberals to mock the powerful and fatuous, and laugh together through their shared outrage. The chanting and hooting from the studio audience was polite liberalism tapping into its id. On 'Colbert,' the anti-vaxxer would have been discredited by the eager support of the idiotic Colbert character; on 'The Daily Show,' she would have been openly ridiculed. Here, Wilmore and the other guests on the panel mostly tried to reason with her, which is more generous, and perhaps even more useful, than simple excoriation or humiliation. But can the search for consensus or good will be funny? 'I'm not interested in doing a show where I give my opinion and people react to my opinion,' Wilmore said a few weeks ago, during a press appearance. 'Our show is more about the discovery of things. I want people who will teach me something.' So far, however, there has been little evidence of discovery."

Featured Events

---

---

---

---