Arendt and Exceptionalism

06-30-2014

“I am not disturbed at all about being a woman professor, because I am quite used to being a woman.”

--Cited in Arendt obituary, New York Times, 5 December 1975

For most readers of Hannah Arendt, the intellectual and personal commitments that motivated Arendt’s pithy response to a reporter’s question about her reaction to being the first woman to be offered the rank of full professor at Princeton University are clear. Arendt saw in this and other attempts to be exceptional in one’s community a narrative in which the exceptional individual removes herself from the shared fate of the community. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt offers a powerful critique of those she called “exception Jews” whose wealth allowed them to be “exceptions from the common destiny of the Jewish people,” as well as “Jews of education,” who felt themselves exempted from “Jewishness” by virtue of having become “exceptional human beings” in their education.

In this post, I focus not on the issues that arise from the relationship between the exception individual and the community he attempts to leave, which was Arendt’s focus, but on those surrounding the relationship between the individual and the community he attempts to join. I do so by exploring two contemporary examples of exceptionalism—the exceptional immigrant or minority student and the extraordinary father figure. While the example of the exceptional student largely tracks Arendt’s case of the exception Jew whose exceptionalism gestures toward a relatively powerful community, the case of the exceptional father reveals the potential dangers of appropriation and invisibility that arise when the relatively powerful gesture toward the relatively powerless through claims to exceptionalism. Both allow me to expand on Arendt’s critique and explore the various ways in which power is exercised in an individual’s claim to exceptionalism and the community’s acceptance of such claims.

There are today a number of scholarships that recognize and promote the studies of “exceptional” immigrants and minority students. The Soros Foundation’s fellowship for New Americans, which grants graduate school scholarships to naturalized citizens of the United States, is a prominent and characteristic one. But in promoting the scholarship of students who are more likely than their non-immigrant, white American peers to have confronted obstacles in their education, these fellowships often demand that individuals make themselves exceptions to their communities. They request narratives of students’ uniqueness not just as high-achieving college students but as individuals whose success grows, quite exceptionally, out of historic, economic, and social conditions that necessarily define this exceptionalism in contrast to the community—or at least to the dominant society’s understanding of its history and cultural norms.

[caption id="attachment_13555" align="aligncenter" width="550"] Source: The New Americans Campaign[/caption]

The problem here isn’t just that students are asked to present themselves as stereotypes or as stereotypical exceptions. The problem is that the narrative of exceptionalism often serves to strip these students of the power to challenge the dominant American community by virtue of his or her success.

Narratives of exceptionalism reinforce the idea that American identity is exclusive of the identities of immigrants and minorities and, as a consequence, serve to affirm the power structure that disempowers these individuals in the first place. The exceptional New American must portray her community as a mere backdrop against which—and away from which—she has become the unique, exceptional individual who merits society’s recognition. And to the extent that individuals accept this narrative, they not only construct their histories as reified stages against which to display their achievement, but also undermine themselves as potential challengers to the dominant community and its exclusive claim to define what membership in it looks like.

I think it was out of respect for her individual accomplishments and the multiple sources of agency, novelty, and power in the community of women to which she belongs that Arendt rejected the interviewer’s attempt to make her the exception. As the first woman to be invited to join Princeton’s faculty, Arendt, by definition, was exceptional. Her response is not a blind denial of this fact, but a rejection of the implication that her joining the privileged community in Princeton must occur on terms exclusive of women. As individual carriers of this non-dominant history in the United States, those who are not presumptively members of the dominant community, whether because of sex and gender or race, are all potential sources of a transformation, however small, of the boundaries of the dominant community and identity. In claiming for oneself the status of an “exception,” one forgoes the opportunity to challenge the boundaries of membership and the distribution of power and oppression that follow their lines.

A second example of exceptionalism emerged for me out of a seemingly ubiquitous image, that of a sleeping father with a newborn baby on his chest. These now-common photos usually display a tired man with a peacefully sleeping baby sprawled out on his bare chest. They are meant to capture the extra-ordinary sweetness of a man so intimate with his baby and the exceptional character of such men who are so “involved.” They are romantic and romanticized images that reflect our collective memory that men have traditionally not been in this role and our collective and growing desire for men to increasingly adopt this role that has traditionally been held exclusively by women.

But in their representations of these men as “exceptional”—as men who are not like other men and deserve recognition for adopting traditionally maternal responsibilities and positions, physical and otherwise—these photos and those who propagate them threaten to make invisible that very community of women to which these men invariably gesture. Women, who have always and quite unexceptionally occupied the position of caretaker, fade into the background as the sepia and sienna Instagrammed father, who may or may not be actively engaged in household duties, publicly takes over the caretaker position.

All the while, women today still perform the majority of household responsibilities, even as they work outside the home just as men do. To the extent that these images aren’t gestures of solidarity with the women who are expected to do this work, but are pictorial memorializations of the extraordinariness of men engaging in “women’s work,” there is the danger that they obscure the work that women have always performed and continue to perform without praise or memorialization.

In the admixture with the privileged fate from which these men “join” the community of women, the common fate of women as presumed caretakers becomes rewritten as a glorious mix of sweet, joyful, and beautiful heroism. This new picture threatens to eradicate, or at least obscure, the less-rosy picture of the economic, political, social, personal, and sexual history of women as caretakers and marginalize those who demand changes to the economic, political, and social structures that continue to burden women’s roles as caretakers.

This is not to say that men shouldn’t take active roles in the care of family and children, nor do I want to discourage scholarships for minority and immigrant students. But Arendt’s critique of exceptionalism alerts us to the dangers that accompany such claims to and expectations of exceptionalism and should force us to be vigilant about these claims as claims to power.

--Jennie Han