Both of our texts this week explored the ways in which humans come to exist, notably within the political context of the public sphere, an ongoing process of performances between accepted participants who are in on the joke of reality. Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition is a feverish championing of natality and action which depends on speech to actualize. Arendt raises power as the thread holding together this discursive web of human interconnectedness. To not join in on this game of life is to “forfeit” the potential to power, in turn becoming “impotent,” regardless of personal strife or reasoning (201).
Arendt highlights the tradition of the polls as a means to distinguish oneself as well as remedy the seeming futility of action and speech. If politics is to spring forth from the polls, they should then strive to embolden the good promises of action, making speech immortal, like an exercise in an organized remembrance. There is a need to be together to fully understand the gravity of the human experience.
Arendt argues that reality is only as real as we dare to comprehend it. When minoritarian groups are banished from the realm of the public sphere, they risk losing a say in the very essentialities of life. In this struggle of power, action is hungrily squashed, for it is the underlying actuality to the human experience, with no foreseeable end. And yet, we attempt to untether ourselves from the inane perpetuity of action by confirming each others existence; We see each other and in turn continually give birth to our potentialities to do what we want (can?) with the world we have between us; we show up when we turn up.
Within Judith Butler’s Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, she more directly confronts this idea of togetherness. Examining the performative right to appear, Butler wonders who constitutes the “people” of “we the people.” She links the concept of precarity to gender and other limiting social constructions. Butler’s sees the fight to assemble as the fight against becoming the “dispensable” within a society, one without a presence on the frontlines of the making of mankind, championing precarity as the saving grace of the relation of man.
Butler is constantly in discussion with Arednt’s notion of bodily action igniting principles freedom and equality, upholding an interdependency of being that Arendt hints at but refrains from fully encapsulating. This “push” against Arendt is defiant when Butler further explores exactly who constitutes the “we” of “we the people”. She is deeply concerned with who gets to enter this arena of fabrication and by what toll they can enter. In this “push”, Butler contends that Arendt is too dismissive of the perplexities involved when one group is excluded from publicity. Yet, Butler accepts the Arendtian characteristic that freedom transpires not necessarily from the individual, but due to the relation between individuals. Thus, espousing an equality that makes capable the conditions for bodily materialization as an essential component of a politics where everyone has a right to rights.