The Promise of Action

By Hans Teerds

“Wherever men come together, in whatever numbers, public interests come into play.… And the Public Realm is formed. In America where there are still spontaneous associations, which then disband again – the kind of associations already described by Tocqueville – you can see this very clearly. Some public interests concerns a specific group of people, those in a neighborhood or even in just one house or in a city or in some other sort of group. Then these people will convene, and they are very capable of acting publicly in these matters – for they have an overview of them.”

-- Hannah Arendt, “What Remains? The Language Remains” [interview with Günther Gaus]

In a neighborhood in Amsterdam where we lived, a group of neighbors joined forces in order to halt a little playground’s deterioration. The playground had been maintained for decades by the public services of the municipality. However, in the last decade, due to budget cuts and a changing perspective on the role of a municipality within urban society, the playground slowly but surely went into decay. Despite the closing of the fences, the playground was still in heavy use. So the neighbors decided to do something. A committee was set up, a list of volunteers formed, and a letter to the municipality written. And it succeeded: the municipality in the end embraced this initiative and was able to push aside all formalistic and bureaucratic procedures. The neighboring committee was allowed to open up the playground on Wednesday afternoons for when the kids arrived home from school. On the weekends, they were also allowed to operate a cabin next to the sandpit, from which they could loan buckets, shovels, and small bikes to the kids; sell coffee and tea to comfort the parents; and on hot-summer days provide ice cream to be enjoyed by all. A new spirit has also run through the playground: the playground equipment has been refurbished and new materials have been bought. Today this place is very popular – the sandpit almost overcrowded – and there are enough volunteers to fill the schedule of keeping an eye on the playground and to lend out materials.

[caption id="attachment_16214" align="aligncenter" width="529"] Source: YouTube[/caption]

I thought of this example when I looked to Hannah Arendt’s interview with Günther Gaus, of which the quote above is taken. (The transcript is published in Jerome Kohn’s collection of Arendt’s writings under the title ‘Essays in Understanding’.) Arendt, all the while heavily smoking, is quite stubborn in this interview. Whereas the interviewer is trying the push her every now and then, she takes steps back in order to clarify some of her ideas. One of these is the question of action and the public realm on which she dwells in her book The Human Condition. Gaus takes issue in particular with her brutal statement that only a few people today are able to act: “the ability to act is restricted to a few people.” This commentary by Arendt, one which somehow parallels her other statement that the capacity to think also seems to be limited to certain people, easily can be read as a critique of the European welfare state model and its utopian perspectives. Indeed, by ‘freeing’ the inhabitants of their everyday sorrows, the argument goes, this model succeeded in turning the inhabitants into the opposite of what it actually aimed for: instead of creating actively engaged and well-educated free citizens, it tempted the citizen to settle into a passive, not to say consuming, approach to the world. In other words, although freedom (of labor) did become the core-characteristic of the Western world, this did not urge the inhabitants to become engaged in the world. Instead consumption turned into the exemplary approach to the world and its political affairs.

Gaus takes Arendt’s quote and immediately runs with it to the highest level of political action: that of the statesman. Arendt however is quick to bring action back to the streets, to the small and local gatherings of people, in which (also) the public realm is formed. At the higher level of political action, Arendt is quite aware of the incremental complexity of the world. The statesman, she argues, has to be surrounded by advisors that contradict each other, for the complexity of the world, after all, cannot be captured by a single view. The task of the statesman is therefore to judge between these perspectives, often on situations with which he is not familiar. However, action is not captured in this virtual and highly abstract realm of the statesman; it is not only bound to formal public spaces of the agora and the market. On the contrary, Arendt here makes action more concrete by embedding it in the spaces of everyday gatherings and around local issues and shared interests. This might be provoked not only by her reference to the spontaneous associations of people in America, as she states here, but also by the local councils that were set up after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. These happenings, although not completely successful in the end, did largely influence her perspective on the world, the political realm, and the promise of action. The power of the space of appearance is not located on the highest level of the political spectrum but specifically at its bottom. Wherever people gather together, shared interests are at stake, Arendt writes. It is due to the locality of these very interests, of which the people have an overview, that people (again) can act. “They are very capable to act publicly in these matters.”

[caption id="attachment_16221" align="aligncenter" width="570"] Source: The Huffington Post[/caption]

The example of the local Amsterdam playground of course is just an example of a broader development that can be touched upon today: an unpredicted renewed spirit of agency that small groups of inhabitants can use to actively engage in their own environment. Although these forms of self-initiative were preceded by other forms of engaging in local issues, as for instance in the squatter movement of the seventies and eighties as well as in the ‘reclaim the streets’ movement from the nineties and early 21^st century, the vast amount of initiatives today nevertheless are surprising. Examples can be found all over the world and range from projects of urban farming to the organization of festivals, from temporary using empty lots to revising playgrounds. These examples are still limited to the local ‘commons’, one might state, but this spirit is nevertheless also tangible in the unpredicted protests that arose in 2011 and extended thereafter: the world-wide Occupy movement, the Tahir Square protests, the Gezi Park Revolt, and so on. Although the latter movements surely embrace a much wider scope, it is in both directions that the power of ‘action’ is re-appropriated and applied to distinct circumstances – the local extending to the global, just as the global affects the local.

However, it is in both occasions that people again take initiatives, that they not only feel responsible for their own ‘life’– which is the lonely position, Arendt argues – but also actively take ‘ownership’ of certain issues and leave the consumerist habitus behind. One might argue that the breakdown of the welfare state, as we see it today in the West, insisted that the inhabitants renew their approach to the world, a process urged by the 2008 financial crisis. However, specifically these new forms of (spatial) agency show the promise of action: what municipalities and their services, institutions of neighborhood control, and social help cannot do, and what the people themselves can do, i.e. take initiatives and responsibilities, to become actively involved, act and speak, and here also very literally transform the world. This makes tangible what Arendt meant with ‘action’ in The Human Condition: to appear in public, to take initiatives, to join forces, and to form new collectives. And the promise is that this will affect the world in unpredicted ways. The promise of change is first and foremost in the hands of inhabitants joining forces to take responsibility for their own environment. But also on a secondary level, these local initiatives affect the global world we live in as well as the political realm on the highest level. It makes visible and tangible how people themselves relate to the world – not as consumers, not even as voters, but as actors themselves.

Featured Image Source: Rafcha (Flickr)