"When philosophy paints its grey in grey then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk." -- G.W.F. Hegel, 'Preface', Philosophy of Right.
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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx
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Arendt: rhetoric and performance
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September 6, 2005
Ned Curthoys in 'The Politics of Holocaust Representation' in Arena Journal locates Hannah Arendt's conception of politics as performance in the classical rhetorical tradition. He says:
The active political language Arendt seeks is, surprisingly enough, rhetorically adept, emanating from a culture whose elites were educated and trained in the persuasive arts, and where a certain degree of formal variety and esprit in speech delivery was demanded. Reversing our usual conceptions of rhetoric as manipulative and/or cliched language, Arendt follows Cicero in valorizing rhetoric as the basis for an acculturated political and legal praxis, a civil science and republican virtue. Rhetoric, in this non-utilitarian sense of the word, provides the necessary social skills for a heady interactive public space such as the democratic assembly, the agora or marketplace. Rhetorical training for participation in these spaces inculcates the art of vigorous argument, sociable persuasion, exercises in perspective, and a delight in controversy between equals, imbuing public spiritedness and a desire for civic participation.
Ned goes on to say that in the culture of the ancient Athenian polis and the Roman republic of the first century AD, the 'who' which energetically disclosed itself was often the political orator whose formal excellence enhanced institutional genealogies of communication skills and continually renewed recognized forms of deliberation and argument. He adds:
Within an Arendtian politics, the rhetor's power of public address, stylistic felicity, personal distinction, and inventive reasoning augmented the body politic, volatile and renewing political and legal thought through the luminosity of public performances. The firmly delimited political sphere of antiquity was, then, a forum for greatness in word and (or as) deed, possessing a 'power' that continually enriched the public realm with new 'appearances' and natal human 'artifacts'. The specific meaning of each deed in a truly public-political realm, argues Arendt, can lie only in the 'performance itself and neither in its motivation or achievement'
The identity of the self is an achievement of the actor in the public world creating a particular style of action.
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