The essential work of politics is the configuration of its own space. It is to make the world of its subjects and its operations seen. The essence of politics is the manifestation of dissensus as the presence of two worlds in one.
Jacques Rancière, Dissensus
The more questioningly we ponder the essence of technology, the more mysterious the essence of art becomes.
Martin Heidegger The Question Concerning Technology
…For I approach deep problems like cold baths: quickly into them and quickly out again. That one does not get to the depths that way, not deep enough down, is the superstition of those afraid of the water, the enemies of cold water; they speak without experience. The freezing cold makes one swift.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
A pure being, in and of itself, comes into representable, comprehensible, signifiable existence when a form is given to which it is attached. The form and its being have no natural, intrinsic, a priori association but rather of an intentional choice externally packaged. Such a process of mediation, from which a structure is formed, is of the concern of the interplay of ontology and epistemology, of the relation between how a being is and how it appears to be. In the same vein, when the temporal dimension is added, a historical truth, or any truth in itself, comes into existence when a narrative is correspondingly employed. And this truth-giving process given by the emplotment of the story, which is of the concern of rhetoric, naturally becomes the site of contestation and violence. Epistemology, thereby construed, is not only of a theoretical importance that investigates how a being is statically represented, but of a practical one that tries to understand how the representation interacts with that which is represented. Epistemology, therefore, is politics.
Soon after the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, Judith Butler wrote a book called What
World is This? Butler examined the social, political, even ecological problems in our contemporary
world with theoretical considerations. This essay, in the same vein, tries to understand what it means for humankind to cohabit, to share a world in which we live. Based on Hannah Arendt’s
Human Condition, and its central division between the three human activities of labor, work, and
action, we aim to provide theoretical apparatuses to understand our current situation from her perspective, just like what she was doing during her time. However, due to the scope of this essay, our discussion will be centered around the more foundational understanding of the question of the world: What is a world? What is in a world? What is the worldliness of a world?
With them, I hope we are at least better-oriented towards contemporary discussion or even intervention of our own human condition.
Since the human condition of the activity of work is worldliness, this essay attempts principally to explicate the functionality of the category of work in Arendt’s Human Condition.
Instead of examining the three categories of viva activa altogether, this essay views work as a mediating category between labor and action, something functions auxiliarily. This presentation of The Human Condition, however, does not position work as something subservient or in any way entirely dependent upon other categories; rather, work, for Arendt, is foundational to describing other human activities which are always pinned against the category of work, whose essence can only be delineated negatively. Granted, for instance, that the distinction Arendt made between labor and work was ‘unusual,’ (79) which she acknowledged in the very beginning of the chapter on labor, this distinction should also have unusual motivation for Arendt to do so, and we will start our investigation from there.
To argue for work’s importance and its subsequent relation to understanding the concept of the world, we divide this essay into three parts. We will first examine the relationship between labor and work, in which we conclude that the purpose of work here is to describe labor and a society of labor, which are opposed to work as something cyclical and has no mean-end structure. We discuss Arendt’s description of human beings’ tentative of leaving the necessity of life, which necessarily fails, for the consumer side of the society was ignored, and work thus fall back into labor. We then move on to the examination of a turning point of the definition of work, that is, the publicity aspect of work, which is for the first time formally revealed, and was used to consider further the relationship of work and action. Apart from Arendt’s obvious intension of making clear that action is unpredictable and therefore different from work, she seems to also argue that work, as a production of public sphere, could be a precondition of action. It is at this point this essay falls into a paradoxical situation in which a reconsideration of the nature of this division of human activities into three. Upon further revision, we propose the three are not mutually exclusive identities, but perspectives, lens, apparatuses through which we can understand each and every human activity with multilayered yet non-trivial judgements. And it is from this conclusion we finally answer our original question: what is a world?
Degradation of Work
In the chapter on labor, work serves as an ideal vita activa men strives for, contrary to labor, which is necessitated by human’s biological needs and which they try to exclude from the condition of their lives; (84) however, as Arendt claims, this attempt always fail in our increasingly consumptive society. Men only takes leisure time, which they gained by frees themselves from the necessity of labor, to consume; yet consume is merely the other side of labor. After the industrial revolution, labor was brought “out of hiding and into the public realm,” (87) and transformed from “the means of [one’s] own subsistence” to something “capable of producing a ‘surplus.’” (88) This surplus generated but the productivity of labor, unlike the productivity of work, as Arendt claims, only produces things that concerns with “the means of its own reproduction,” and it never produces “anything but life.” (88) Contrary to this definition of labor has Arendt the concept of work which was done by homo faber to transform some material “into a worldly object.” (91) This worldly object is “guarantee[d] durability without which a world would not be possible at all.” (94) While a homo faber is worldly and animal laboran is worldless, it does not mean labor is somehow the opposite of work, as in the case of nature, which tends to be “a constant thread of decaying [our world].” (98) Labor, although operates in cyclical movement just like nature, (96) on the other hand, preserves “the world against natural processes.” (100) The most significant difference between labor and work is that, as already hinted at, that the former produce product only contingently, and for a very immediate consumption, while the product produced by the latter is destroyed only “incidentally but [this destruction is] inherent in consumption.” (138) To this point, a relatively solid distinction between labor and work has been established.
This distinction, just like the product from labor, is also contingent for the later mergence between the two, or rather, the return to work failed to return but instead moving towards something called “hobby.” Marx imagined a world of hobbyists, who has rid of the necessity of labor by the development of productive technology like automation. The problem, however, Arendt claims, is that such activity is still private and worldless, just like labor. (118) Why and how is hobby different from work, and why Arendt seems to not be satisfied with it? These would naturally be the next questions to ask. And to answer them, we need to first investigate how industrialization changed the nature of work.
In the next section, Arendt makes the distinction between specialization and division of labor. While specialization requires “different skills,” division of labor “presupposes…qualitative equivalence…and these activities have no end in themselves.” (123) This is where the division between labor and work starts to be blurred. Since there is indeed an end product produced from this collaborative process, yet the product, in this consumer’s society, is less durable and becomes more align with consumption instead of use: It consists in treating all use objects as though they were consumer goods, so that a chair or a table is now consumed as rapidly as a dress and a dress used up almost as quickly as food. This mode of intercourse with the things of the world, moreover, is perfectly adequate to the way they are produced… (124) Thus, everything is produced and used/consumed in a faster and faster rate, and the consumption is guaranteed even before the product is produced. (125) The whole society operates more like a biological organism and the work done by individual is more like labor, stuck in this cycle of immediate creation and annihilation. In such society, even there are individuals who freed themselves from the necessity of labor, they invest their leisure into activities that are “subsumed under playfulness,” (127) and thereby even the work of artist is “dissolved into play and has lost its worldly meaning.” (128) Even they are freed from the necessity of labor, Arendt writes, that they are less free than the true homo faber. (129) For emancipation from labor implies also the emancipation from consumption, (131) the playful artists, by consuming products in supporting their seemingly free leisure activities, only exacerbate the cyclical process of the society and enslave more workers into laboring for necessity.
The objective of this chapter is very clear: Arendt formulates the degradation of work into labor in consumer’s society, and the attempted return to work fails –– it returns only to hobby. Humanity still stuck in a cyclical process without beginning and end, without a world in which they can inhabit. If we look specifically at the concept of work and the properties that has been interposed in the argumentation, we see precisely nothing other than world-making, that it produces durable objects, and the mean-ends structure, that it produces tools for further usage, which makes it susceptible to be degraded into labor in a consumer’s society by reversing the means-ends relationship. We will, in the next chapter, see how this conception of work gradually changes as Arendt proceeds to her discussion on action.
Trans-formation of Work
Starting the chapter on work, Arendt explicates more carefully how work is different from labor, and how the instrumentality of objects produced by work causes not only labor more integrated into a worldless, artificial world, but also causes homo faber themselves subjected to degradation, before an abrupt turning in the last section on work of art. Arendt first fairly positively described work, such as how it, unlike labor as servant to nature, and action which is subjected to people, is the only master (of nature). (139) Work also differs from labor and action by having a definite beginning (which labor does not) and a definite end (which both labor and action do not possess). (144) Arendt then moves on to discuss how the instrumentality of objects made by homo faber affects labor. She differentiates three stages of industrial development, which embodies a gradual erosion of nature’s power into human world and culminates in the stage of automation. In this successive development, machines start to replace more traditional tools. The difference between them lies in that the latter is “adjusted to the nature of man, while the former adjusted man to the machine,” and thus by which human’s natural rhythm of laboring is mechanized and the joy one felt in laboring disappears. (147) In this way, Arendt writes, machines substitute the world of men by removing the relative permanence of object and instead left only endless, “continuous process of operation” which deprives them of their worldliness, (152) and mankind, instead of carving out a rectilinear line out of the cyclical nature, are “transplanted…into the environment of man.” (153)
Animal laboran are not the only ones who suffer from this means-ends structure, or the
instrumentality of world. Homo faber, too, are agonized by their incapacity to understand the world other than means to ends. Arendt seems to devise two stages of this means-ends structure, which was sublated later in the last section. First, Arendt claims, that the issue at stake is not instrumentality but the “generalization of the fabrication in which usefulness…are established as the ultimate standards for life and the world of men.” (157) And thus, men become not only the measure of things, but “of literally everything there is.” (158) It is at this point, our capacity of seeing, and only seeing, the utility of things “deprives all things of their intrinsic world.” (159) Arendt moves on to what I call the second stage of this means-ends structure, which involves the exchange market and how value are establish in, and only in, the public. There is a pivot point in which the merchants no longer engage with others in the market and have proper relationship by “exchanging his products with theirs.” (160) The problem lies in that the production of objects, in an industrial society, is no longer carried out by one homo faber in isolation, but as a collaborative pursuit of animal laboran. Thereby the merchants in exchange market stopped embodying themselves in the product they produced, but as “owners of labor power” who degrades and alienates men into commodity, as once famously formulated by Marx.
(162) It is here the nature of things changed, and therefore rises a class of manufacture who “produces exchange objects rather than use things.” (163) Homo faber, as someone who can only understand things in terms of its instrumentality, now starts to valorize everything based on their exchange-, instead of the mysterious use-value, and produces in accordance with this valorization, hereby their ends justify the means.
This is the misery of homo faber, who is unable to understand things without giving it a purpose, no matter whether man or god is the measure of all things. Arendt clearly discerns this problem, and it is with those issues in head she turns to writing the work of art section. It is here the most radical rupture, perhaps in the whole work, appears. Arendt describes art as something “strictly without any utility whatsoever” and thereby “defy equalization through…money.” (167) Art is also something that has “outstanding permanence,” (167) yet essentially all things produced by homo faber shares more or less this quality, and by which things appears in “shape and makes it beautiful or ugly.” (172) Here we come to another important quality of work, that is, its aestheticity, which “transcend its functional use, and its transcendence…is identical with appearing publicly and being seen.” (173) With this point, Arendt ends her chapter on work. The category of work is now transformed from a means-ends structure, ends being either used value or exchange value, to a transcendental essence as publicity, by which human can find a home against the ever-recurring motion of nature, and allows plurality to even appear at all: In order to be what the world is always meant to be, a home for men during their life on earth, the human artifice must be a place fit for action and speech, for activities not only entirely useless for the necessities of life but of an entirely different nature from the manifold activities of fabrication by which the world itself and all things in it are produced. We need not choose here between Plato and Protagoras, or decide whether man or a god should be the measure of all things; what is certain is that the measure can be neither the driving necessity of biological life and labor nor the utilitarian instrumentalism of fabrication and usage. (173)
Deployment of Work
With this eruption in defining and contesting the essence of work, Arendt turns to the chapter on action. The more usual take on Arendt’s division between work and action –– her caution of us substituting making for action thereby misunderstood the unpredictability of action (188) –– understands work in an earlier stage in the development of the concept of work, which was seen as a means-ends structure, in which a conception of product, a model, is already presented in mind before its actualization. (140) In addition to this, as Arendt has discovered the alternative essence of work as revealing, or publicity, she now also tries not only to differentiate work from action, but based action on work, that work is somehow an indispensable compliment to action.
As early as in the chapter on labor, Arendt has already presented us that “action, speech, and thought…themselves do not ‘produce,’ bring forth anything, they are futile as life itself.” (95) And in order to become worldly, they must first “be seen, heard, and remembered and then transformed, reified as it were, into things.” (95) And two pages later when she talks about the cyclical nature of life, Arendt made speech and action the primary examples of our ability to begin anew, our unique capacity of natality. Even here, she implicitly asserts that work is an essential element that carries out this natality, “the end result [of action and speech] will always be a story with enough coherence to be told, no matter how accidental or haphazard the single events and their causation may appear to be.” (97) In addition, action and speech are not simply something for which work is a compliment, it seems work is even the condition of possibility of action and speech, since work constructs a common world, and only in a common world, by having common sense and using a common language, can human beings act upon and speak to each other. Arendt claims that action and speech “go on between men,” and “most words and deeds are about some worldly objective reality…” (182) That is to say, acting in a world presupposes a world, a common world.
However, Arendt suggests that there is also another, “subjective in-between” which is not tangible, and act in this realm “can leave behind no…results and end products,” yet they are “no less real than the world of things we visibly in common.” (183) this is the ‘web’ of human relationships. This is not to say that there is some action that is not dependent upon material or the world of things, since, as Arendt subsequently pointed out, that “this web is no less bound to the objective world of thing than speech is to the existence of a living body.” (183) The example Arendt gives is the Greek polis, in which men “live together and share words and deeds” (196) The polis, as she writes, “was supposed to multiply the occasions to win ‘immortal fame.’” (197) We see here the function of polis is already connected with work, which is the pursuit of something relatively permanent, to last in the cyclical world; it “assures that…action and speech…would become imperishable.” (198) Nevertheless, this space does not always exist, for “most of [the people] like the slave, foreigner…do not live in [the world or the polis].” (199) This observation naturally leads us to localize our, or at least my, attention to the question of what determines the inside and outside of a world, the division of public and private realm. Arendt tends to answer this question by beginning the next section, introducing the concept of the space of appearance, which “precedes all formal constitution of the public realm.” (199) This is the space where people gather together and appear in each other’s world. I argue that the making of this space, which precedes the public realm, which in turn, at least Arendt claims, conditions all forms of action and speech, involves a large part of the activity of work, whose function as we explicated earlier, is not simply instrumentality, but also publicity, which is what makes work political, instead of unpolitical as Arendt claims. (212) In the labor movement section, Arendt differentiates political organizations and trade unions, in which the latter are “responsible for its incorporation into modern society,” the formers “propose a new form of government,” (216) and historically, the trade unions “have gone from victory to victory, while the political labor movement has been defeated each time…” (217) And the Hungarian revolution mentioned by Arendt belongs to the latter. She claims, as long as “it achieved nothing more than it “showed the world that…this political élan has not yet died, its sacrifices were not in vain.” (217) Here we seem to see Arendt’s definition of action, speech, and work, to be blurred together. While the first two are political in that they interact directly with other people, work enacts it through an intermediate object, and it is unpolitical; while action occurs within a sphere of publicity or space of appearances, it is speech and work that, by virtue of their publicity, brought those spaces themselves into existence first.
However, would this sort of political labor movement be an action, a speech, or a work?
Arendt writes that it aims at “founding a new public space,” instead of trying to be admitted and speak in the original, already existing public space, a contrast which we similarly see in the division between political organization and trade union. It is not action and speech, for it does not suppose a prior space of appearances, like the Greek polis, but it is also not work, for it does not produce a product and it is political, yet those are the only three things that are public. What is it, then?
It is at this point we should turn our attention to the fact whether our original understanding of the three activities as distinct and mutually exclusive needs radical revision.
Arendt’s proto-phonocentric description of action and speech as opposed to work, presumes a larger ontological framework in which the division between event and materiality has always already been made and one prior to the other. If action is a process, like all natural processes, as Arendt claims, unpredictable and will lasts as long as the mortality of humanity itself, (233) why would work have a determinable end once the product is completed? Action could be seen as working towards an end, a configuration of substance that endures in time, such as the making of a political party, while work could also be seen as an event that has long lasting effects –– such as the writing of this book itself. In quantum mechanics, the discovery of wave-particle duality
and how observation actually changes the state of the nature as observant –– we act into nature
has caught Arendt’s sustained attention at the time. The consideration on the nature of
things, processes and substances as two sides of the same coin, seems also to shed lights on Arendt’s distinction between different human activities that also correspond to these ontological categories. What was implied, then, seems to be the hidden, effaced co-constitution of labor, work, and action. Hannah Arendt’s predicament is clear enough, that if action and speech need to be happened within a space of appearances, how does the transcendental condition of action, that is, the space itself, come into existence without intervention? One must be given a voice before one can speak. Here we fall into a recursive structure in which action determines a space, yet space determines one’s action –– emblematic to the age-old French discussion of the interrelation between subject and structure, and Arendt does not seem to offer an answer.
Let us review what has been done in the past few pages: We examined the Arendt’s discussion of labor and work, the latter of which serves as a transcendental object to which labor, and our labor/consumer’s society was delineated negatively. Our increasingly structured society becomes analogous to a biological organism in which consumption and production are accelerated, objects are produced by homo faber only for an immediate later consumption; what was supposed to be the world-building work has degraded into cyclical labor. Next, we considered the rupture in the constitution of work by turning from its instrumentality to its publicity, which we suspect is to a strategic consideration of Arendt in introducing action which relies on publicity in the very adjacent next section. In the last part, we investigated the relationship between work, especially as public object in the world, and action/speech with examples from the labor movement; we realized that it is impossible to resolve a clear-cut distinction between them, which leads us to reconsider the larger framework Arendt is working with, and implicated an understanding of viva activa not as distinct activities but different perspectives on the same subject.
With this in hand, how are we going to answer our original question, that is, what is a world? A world, as we seen in Arendt, is to be surrounded by durable man-made objects. But are they simply houses, tables, books? It seems to me that their essence could be derived from our consideration on the category of work. Thus far, we considered work as producing use object, exchange object, and public object. The worldly objects surrounded us are not simply physical processes, but, seen from these perspectives, tools towards possibilities, embodiment of labor powers, of political contestation and violence, or even unresolved trauma and grief…The world in which we live is not simply a distant landscape that we disinterestedly appreciate, but the relate to every micro aspect of our lives; behind what is presented to us is a series of trying for their complication to be seen and voice to be heard, and beyond them is the possibilities of resolution, of promise and forgiving. This invites us to think what is behind this world of appearance, whether there is something hidden behind, if what we have seen is already a struggle to be seen, what about those failed attempts? We them dive into the past and the future of this phenomenal world, tries to trace the faintest voice… Brendan Pascal and I has been working on the back porch for weeks. Since the very first day, I have been telling him what we are doing is ‘world-building.’ Since then, every time we work on the back porch, Brendan will say it out loud that we are ‘world-building.’ But was it really world-building? I was thinking to myself. General labor is, at the end of the day, a labor; it is caught in the process of generation and consumption, even some relative permanent objects has been incidentally produced. The back porch was abandoned when we first visited it. It was full of nature’s remnant: it was covered by dirty and leaves and other things to a point that one can hardly tell it was originally a porch. Now we are curating it back, it is well-sustained, with newly added rock path and plants and grass. We have to sweep once in a few days, otherwise the incessant force of nature will again take over our possession into its ever-recurring movement.
Even though we are building something as a homo faber would build a house, the inevitable long- lasting effort to keep it from nature also make our work a labor. Finally, one day, we build something, something unnamable, an artwork, perhaps, as shown in the above picture: One wood stand alone in the garden, another tilted on top, with its bottom grounded by a white rock which I don’t know the name, and more white rocks form in a line with geometric spacing extending towards the viewer. I asked Makoto what he thinks it was. He said, “eternal recurrence.” The rocks were patterned in a way to position the shadow the wood casts as the sun moves along, perhaps that is what he was getting at, or not. It does not matter. What matter is that this is not simply a work we have done, that finds a definite end as the product is produced.
On the other hand, this work will have long-lasting effect as a process; it is an action. Perhaps later deep springs student will come and go and inhabit this place, and each tries to interpret the meaning of this work. They might wonder to what purpose have we built this work. The discovery of back porch by me and Brendan in itself already is a form of remembrance, the effects of earlier work, or action, causes this relative permanence by making us discover their space of appearances and perhaps someone will write a story about them, and that is the origin of history.
This is a very simple exemplification of how the three fundamental activities of humankind can collapsed into an indistinguishable whole. As we are building our world –– the back porch and the garden –– we inevitably remember what has gone before us and maintain this rectilinear diversion from the natural cycle. This is not to say the division is pointless, as we already seen in answering the question of what is a world, this contingent separation allows us to see more and differently. At the end of the day, just like Wittgenstein’s analogy of language as ladder, that we must throw the ladder away as we have climbed up. The Arendtian distinction are by all means necessary, but when we are trying to experience the world fully, search for some mysterious ultimate truth, they themselves collapse into an indistinguishable whole; and this, I believe, is precisely the spirit of phenomenology.