Revolution

Pearl diving -- the positive case

Last time, I considered the negative case of pearl diving, Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism. When history gets broken by nefarious events, it’s best not to try to explain them too much; you might end up rationalizing or legitimating evil! But when good events happen, which also start something genuinely new in the world, shouldn’t their full historical causality be shared as openly as possible?

Arendt traces the elemental precursors of the origins of totalitarianism, but she leaves their actual constellation or crystallization into Nazism and Stalinism as sudden and arbitrary developments. She wrote pearl diving history to destroy. Conversely, in the case of new kinds of revolution appearing on the historical stage in the American Revolution, of which Arendt approved, why pearl dive, why create a “montage” (Benjamin’s term) when a full description and explanation might help spread the word?

Exemplary Model

Staying with Eva de Valk’s study, let’s see what she thinks Arendt is up to in On Revolution.

In On Revolution [Arendt] retells this story of political revolutions, not in the standard reading in which the French Revolution is seen as archetypical, or in an antiquarian study with a detailed overview of all revolutions that ever occurred, but in a reading in which the American Revolution serves as a model, since it founded a (Republican) tradition that, according to Arendt, is worth being remembered. On Revolution can be seen as a creative act of re-thinking the past, with the aim to set free its potentials and thereby hoping to create political awareness: the fact that revolutionary change and political freedom have been possible in the past, should give us hope in the present.

Source: Eva de Valk. “The Pearl Divers: Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History.” Krisis (2010), p. 42. (PDF)

On Revolution is an exercise in pearl diving in a positive sense. Pearls in this case really are lost treasure, rich and strange. She quotes Arendt saying: “The history of revolutions — from the summer of 1776 in Philadelphia and the summer of 1789 in Paris to the autumn of 1956 in Budapest — which politically spells out the innermost story of the modern age, could be told in parable form as the tale of an age-old treasure” (Arendt, Preface, Between Past and Future). Collected pearls are also not put on (cautionary) display but are carefully assembled into persuasive and attractive stories.

Arendt is not ‘merely’ showing fragments or quotations from the past, but is retelling forgotten events of the past in the form of a ‘story’, a ‘parable’, or even as a ‘legend’. Quotations played an important role in Arendt’s work, but her main effort was to carve a story out of exceptional events. ‘Storytelling’ would become a way to approach the past after the break in tradition and endow it with new meaning for the present. It would become her Benjamin-inspired version of the pearl diving.

In On Revolution, Arendt first of all wants to tell a story that carries a moral and a clear political agenda: she wants to convince us that the revolutionary foundation of the United States should be exemplary for modern revolutions.

Source: de Valk, p. 42 (see the original for citations, omitted here)

The best sort of historical storytelling, then, comes explicitly with a positive political agenda, to encourage a particular sort of revolutionary foundation “exemplary for modern revolutions.” It’s a parable, meant presumably to be received as wisdom.

Since revolutions for Arendt are primarily about freedom, and the beginning of something new, positive storytelling and constellation-building might provide pearls for our own juncture, the Anthropocene break.

De Valk sees Benjamin’s and Arendt’s works bound together in an open approach to history, and this is pearl diving. Benjamin and Arendt both “cherished revolutions as moments in which the radical new opens up.”

Abundance

And yet, Arendt’s model revolution(s) were not, controversially, about economic or what she called “social” causes, for example rebellions of the poor. The French Revolution was discredited in her eyes precisely for this reason. Rather, she saw the hope of revolutions in purely political terms. The American Revolution succeeded in staying focused on the right things — political reform, political novelty — because America was “blessed with abundance instead of being cursed by scarcity.” The conviction that life on earth is in no way socially static was “prerevolutionary and American in origin; it grew directly out of the American colonial experience.” (Arendt, On Revolution, p. 13) For the first time, it was no longer inevitable that there were two permanent classes of human beings: rich and poor. Once the possibility opened up of changing the “fabric of society,” European revolutions (like the French) became organized around such causes.

But if America was already “blessed with abundance,” why revolt? Motivation in the American case could not be attributed to economics; it had to be purely political. This is Arendt’s insight and the basis of her approval of the American case. A new form of human government was needed for the sake of freedom itself. Arendt’s distinction between two very different revolutionary motivations or causes is crucial to appreciate her unique approach to pearl diving and storytelling. She seeks positive and exemplary revolutions (non-violent), and a hopeful prospect of newness available to open up genuine possibilities in the face of any historical break.

Arendt’s preoccupation and focus on the good of human politics over economics and “society” might seem to disqualify her thought from any relevance for Anthropocene challenges. Won’t the pursuit of freedom in the Anthropocene need to take into account wealth and poverty not only for present day human beings — for whom economic and social misery now are at least theoretically capable of remedy (all else equal) — but for the planet itself, and future generations? All else is not equal.

The “blessing of abundance” so crucial for uncompromised struggle for political freedom for Arendt, has become for us closely identified with our very break in tradition.

The experience of abundance is likely still necessary to undergird any opportunity for genuine political reform. Arendt is not wrong! And yet, our very abundance has become a new political problem of the first order.