(Roughly) Daily

Blake Smith on trail-blazing publisher Michael Denneny and his embodiment of his mentor’s– Hannah Arendt‘s– thought…

Michael Denneny, the recently deceased co-founder and co-editor of the pioneering gay magazine Christopher Street , gay newspaper New York Native , and the gay publishing line at St. Martin’s Press, Stonewall Inn Editions, began his recently published collection of essays On Christopher Street with a quotation from his mentor, Hannah Arendt:

Only in our speaking with one another does the world, as that about which we speak, emerge in its objectivity and visibility from all sides. Living in a real world and speaking with one another about it are basically one and the same.

Denneny’s career as a gay cultural activist was a way of putting into practice Arendt’s thought as condensed in this citation…

…

Arendt argued throughout her work, although with critically shifting emphases, that the possibility of political freedom for society as whole depends on particular groups within it being able to constitute distinct “worlds” in which their members can exchange perspectives, debate their common interests, and face the wider “world” composed of other groups. That is, a healthy society is diverse in the sense of being made up of individual units like economic classes and religious and ethnic minorities (represented by associations, trade unions, churches etc.), which are themselves characterized by internal diversity and lively debate.

Diversity and debate prevent, in a logic familiar from Montesquieu and Madison, the emergence of a single all-powerful leader or stifling consensus. In such accounts, which form the basis for American political common sense today, we imagine minorities as homogenous interest groups, which, in the play of their rival ambitions, keep each other in check, through a kind of balance of power akin to that at work in international relations. Politicized minorities, each pursuing its collective interests, can, if their debates and rivalries are properly channeled, be a force for good in politics.  

Arendt’s argument is substantively different. In her account, minorities are important not insofar as they are internally unified groups engaged in the play of countervailing interests and powers, but rather insofar as they are internally heterogeneous groups whose very diversity offers a sort of school in which citizens learn how to have judgment: the capacity to express and exchange ideas without appeal to fixed rules. Differences within “our own groups”—our everyday experiences of debates with other people “like us” in the spaces of our associational life (synagogues, union halls, gay bars, etc.) prepare us for the still more challenging experiences of disagreement in our wider political life, where we cannot necessarily trust that our interlocutors share our identities, experiences, and goals.  

Indeed, the experience of uncertainty is constitutive of politics, as Arendt saw it. Politics is one of a number of domains, she argued, in which we cannot call upon, in the course of our mutual questioning about what is to be done, anything like a logical principle (2+2=4) that all rational beings might recognize or a universally agreed-upon norm that all, or nearly all, members of our community do recognize. In these domains we are obligated to, as she often says, “woo” each other, to practice the arts of rhetorical seduction—which does not mean in her account, that we are in debates over politics merely practicing sophistry.

Rather, we are—as we find ourselves constantly doing in our most quotidian, non-political conversations—appealing to each other to share perspectives (Look!, we say, don’t you see?), on the assumption that each of us is positioned differently, because of our experiences, knowledge, interests, etc., in relation to a field of objects to which we all refer. We assume, in other words, that our divergent perspectives are perspectives on something, on the same things, and that we can by discussing them, inviting our interlocutors into our position by rendering it in speech, and projecting ourselves through our imaginations into their own positions, come closer to a true picture of the situation…

…

…there is a danger that we may [Arendt argued], in the very exchange of perspectives, be speaking not at all to each other, that is, to specific interlocutors whose perspectives—and ultimately whose agreement—we desire (and thus whose disagreement we must tolerate), but rather to an abstract universal media pseudo-conversation, to the empty signifier of an invisible authority [and] one must admit that this peril characterizes our idle chatter on Twitter no less than the talk at cocktail parties and banal book reviews Arendt lamented in her day. In that sense it is not necessarily such a disaster if, for the moment, the possibility of a “national conversation” in media and politics seems to be suspended. Indeed, the whole point of Arendt and Denneny’s insight is to remind us that if we are to learn again how to speak to each other (and not merely speak in each other’s—perhaps merely virtual—presence), then participation in the life of real, concrete, internally diverse groups will be our classrooms…   

Hannah Arendt, Michael Denneny, and the real value of diversity: “Living in Arendt’s World.”

* Hannah Arendt

###

As we explore empathy, we might recall that it was on this date in 2015 that Cecilia Bleasdale sent her daughter Grace photo of a dress she intended to wear to Grace’s wedding. Celia thought that the dress,  blue with black lace, would be perfect; but her daughter saw a white dress with gold lace. Grace posted the photo to Facebook, and the debate– blue/black or white/gold– broadened.

Then a friend uploaded it to Tumblr… and the argument went global. That post saw up to 840,000 views per minute. The next day, the retailer, Roman Originals (which confirmed that the dress was, in fact, blue and black), sold out of the model within 30 minutes.

It spread further. Celebrities posted and reposted, tweeted and retweeted (e.g., Taylor Swift, who saw blue and black and said she was “confused and scared,” was retweeted 111,134 times and liked 154,188 times); morning news shows covered the controversy…

Science has yet adequately to explain the phenomenon.

source