Freedom, "Betweenness", and the Meaning of Politics

08-18-2014

“Politics arises between men, and so quite outside of man. There is therefore no real political substance. Politics arises in what lies between men and is established as relationships.”

-- The Promise of Politics 95, emphasis in original

What is politics? Ask around, and you may get answers such as government, the state, political parties, corruption, “something I don’t care about” and “something that is a threat to my privacy and my freedom.” Hannah Arendt probably wouldn’t be surprised. Arendt notes: “Both the mistrust of politics and the question as to the meaning of politics are very old, as old as the tradition of political philosophy.” Moreover, she continues,

Underlying our prejudices against politics today are hope and fear: the fear that humanity could destroy itself through politics and through the means of force now at its disposal, and, linked with this fear, the hope that humanity will come to its senses and rid the world, not of humankind, but of politics.

In The Promise of Politics, we see Arendt wrestling with questions on the meaning of politics, particularly as it has been inherited in our modern world.

“Politics arises between men, and so quite outside of man.” Let’s take the “between men” phrase repeated in two of the three sentences above. “Between” is a lively preposition. Signifying movement, an interval of time, separation, connection, reciprocal action (see the OED entry), “between” is as Arendt notes fundamentally relational in time and space. “Between” also signals the importance of individuals in our plurality, not a particular vision of the human writ large. For this reason, what is spun from that betweenness as a public activity is so important since it is about the world and a world that, at its best, preserves and enhances a capacity for a life we direct for ourselves with others. That is why space and time matter so much to Arendt, who feels we need a place for this relationship to unfold and the time to renew and restart it.

But what are the conditions for that “between” to even be possible? In The Promise of Politics, Arendt writes a few times that to be a an equal among equals in the Greek experience meant that you had the luxury to be free from the labor of the household and the necessity of work, a situation, she later mentions, that has changed in modernity for women and the working class. The political theorist Sheldon Wolin shares Arendt’s understanding of politics as a “mode of experience.” For Wolin, however, Arendt’s strict separation between the political and the social reveals a lack of attention to the way democracy emphasizes equality and thus the way it breaks down the boundary separating the political from the social. This is a frequent concern among Arendt scholars even today (see the discussion of Ranciere and Arendt on this site).

In thinking about the experience of politics today, we might want to think about a craft of democracy that addresses public action, work, and necessity in an integrated if tension-filled space. There are many examples we could find, but one that’s intriguing from a Western experience comes from the group Livstycket in Stockholm, Sweden (http://www.livstycket.se/01.start/start_eng.htm).

[caption id="attachment_14072" align="aligncenter" width="550"] Livstyket in Stockholm (Frihandelsministern)[/caption]

Livstycket in Stockholm began in 1992 and was founded by Birgitta Notlöf. The goal of the group is to give women who have immigrated to Sweden (although men have a role too) the chance to learn the Swedish language and culture without forgetting their own through artistic craft activities such as sewing, embroidery, and textile printing. Textile prints have included maps of Stockholm, which are drawn from the perspective of these new immigrants according to their own experiences. As a result, words that have a function in crafting (“cut”, “thank you”, “what is?”) build democratic community, in a sense, by teaching these women to learn the Swedish language together. This matters even in a so-called “good society” such as Sweden, which despite a shrinking welfare state and new privatization measures still ensures its inhabitants many of the conditions to be able to act as equals.

Livstycket is located in the suburb of Tensta, where riots sparked by persistent experiences of racism and very high unemployment rates among young male immigrants took place in May 2013. These events, coupled with the longevity of the far-right Swedish Democratic Party, which won about 10% of the vote in the recent European Parliament elections, illustrate that there is a vocal anti-immigrant voice in Swedish political life, not to mention those who contest this rhetoric.

Acknowledging the opposing views on Swedish immigration, Livstycket cultivates a “between” in a space where one can appear as equals even though resources of language, culture, work, or civic status varies between individuals. In so doing, it opens up a space between people in its creativity and construction of a world shaped by the intertwining of publicness, work, and labor. This is a world of people and things, of people with things. It is a craft in terms of products and democratic experiences. I wonder what Arendt would say about this space of the “between” and if she might have hung one of their tea towels in her own kitchen?

In her work, Arendt was critical of determinism and fundamentalism in all their forms. “There is therefore no real political substance. Politics arises in what lies between men and is established as relationships.” However, democracy, when grounded in that ideal that Étienne Balibar has called égaliberté (equaliberty) as evident in the Declaration of Rights in the eighteenth century, is part of our worldliness and offers resources for conditioning a late modern “between.” Certainly democracy as a self-governing practice could end in disaster by destroying the very freedom and equality we seek to enjoy, (This is a risk inherent in democracy of course.) or it could be what we must cultivate to ensure the very spontaneity of action and the plurality of the human condition.

The world as a shared temporal, imaginative, and material reality orients us and does not determine for us how we might both judge together for public purposes and experience freedom. Arendt’s grounding of freedom seems akin to that of Machiavelli, who in The Prince says that a people accustomed to freedom will be more difficult to conquer than a non-free population, presumably because once you have the experience of freedom, you are reluctant to let it go.

Therefore, to the question of “What is the meaning of politics?”, “The answer is: The meaning of politics is freedom.” The root of politics is polis, the city-state, and Athens in particular--where self-governing happens. Freedom is experienced in the Greek world among equals, without compulsion, and commanding and obeying only in emergencies, such as times of war.

We are so familiar with combative relationships among in politics that it may seem strange to think of politics as informed by freedom: an effect of relationships between equals with enough independence, equality and liberty to engage in democratic preservation in agonistic ways that create a shared purpose. But we should. To do so today means departing from the more rigid separation that Arendt offers in The Human Condition among action, work and labor, subsequently allowing us to see that freedom may occur in more hybrid spaces. Traditionally, in this integration and hybridity of spaces, our freedom has been lost - to a loss of time beyond work; to indebtedness for education, housing, or health care; to violence and expulsion. But this hybridity can be thought of as crafting democracy in reference to experiences of freedom as equality and liberty. I agree with Arendt that politics should be recalled as occurring through action in the “between” of relationships. And I also think that this can happen in spaces that Arendt didn’t expect or theorize.

-- Laurie Naranch