The Moment Has Passed Power After Arendt

The Moment Has Passed Power after Arendt

Patchen Markell

“America’s Tahrir Moment”: that’s the title of an Adbusters blog entry from early September 2011. Nobody Can Predict the Moment of Revolution: the title of a short documentary video about Occupy Wall Street produced by some of its participants. “Transforming Occupy Wall Street from a Moment to a Movement”: the headline of a widely circulated article urging the occupiers to organize themselves behind a series of specific progressive demands.1 It’s not hard to understand the appeal of the language of the “moment” as a way of capturing the political rhythms of the past two years, whether in Sidi Bouzid, Oakland, Cairo, London, or lower Manhattan. Against the background of a feeling of political stuckness, of being in a rut you can’t see how to break out of, or of being subject to something—whether it’s an authoritarian dynasty or an economic system—that you feel powerless to contest, political aspiration can take the form of the desire for a moment of radical transformation, of the sudden appearance of new possibilities. Against the same background, promising moments can prove disappointing precisely in their momentariness as old patterns and entrenched powers reassert themselves. Yet the notion of politics as a matter of the sudden and dramatic interruption of ordinary life, whose transformative effects must somehow be made durable without sacrificing what is radical and new in them, comes with significant costs. It has helped to anchor problematic conceptions of the authority of the political theorist: problematic because they fit poorly with the antihierarchical political principles in whose name they are often articulated and problematic because they help to reproduce

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subtly disempowering pictures of the very things—political power and political agency—that theory often promises to secure. In its militant moods, for example, political theory may claim for itself (or be ascribed by its readers) the capacity to anticipate the moment of genu- inely transformative politics or to announce that moment when it comes, certifying its authenticity, distinguishing it from the spurious nonevents that risk distracting political actors from the real thing, and clarifying, even if only in formal terms, what Marx and Engels called the “line of march” that emancipatory political action must take.2 Of course, contemporary left theory, heir to a century and a half of controversy about the relation of theory to practice, does not naively embrace theoretical avant-gardism. Yet for all its demurrals—“this is not a manifesto,” insist Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri at the beginning of their book-length reflections on the year 2011; “we must be the pupils of these movements, not their stupid teachers,” writes Alain Badiou in his newest book, its dust jacket filled from edge to edge with a photograph of a young protester in front of a burning barricade in Cairo—theory in this mode still falls easily into an imperative voice given force by the urgency of the moment, declaring what the multitudes “must” do to be prepared for transformative events when they arrive or deploying theory to distinguish between dead-end riots that lack “enduring truth” and sudden uprisings that, as genuine events, “signal a reawakening of History.”3 In its more melancholic moods, by contrast, political theory may anchor its authority to the momentariness of the political in a different way. A de- cade and a half ago, after Jeffrey Isaac famously complained about the field’s “strange silence” at what had seemed like another momentous opportunity for political theory to speak to practice,4 Sheldon Wolin replied that this silence grew not out of irresponsibility or hyperprofessionalization, but out of a deeper disjunction between the fast tempo of current events and the slow time of theory. For Wolin, that disjunction didn’t reflect an intrinsic gap between theory and practice; instead, it reflected the contemporary disappearance of political theory’s proper object—a displacement in which the slow, deliberative temporality of genuine politics (a temporality that aligns politics with theory) had been increasingly overwhelmed by the frenetic pace of “economy and popular culture.”5 Indeed, thanks to the extraordinary reach and power of the monstrous hybrid of neoliberal capitalism and the imperial state that Wolin thinks has helped effect this disappearance and that he now calls “Superpower,” political action can exist only as a brief and fragile upsurge of popular resistance, whose momentary and “fugitive” character The Moment Has Passed 115

also seems to render it permanently disappointing.6 For Wolin, the sudden flash of politics is less an occasion for the theorist to give direction than, in its momentariness, testimony to the truth of his diagnosis of our seemingly irreversible loss of a politics of a different, slower, more extended kind. In this essay, I want to try to cast some doubt on the framing of politics in terms of moments—whether extraordinary moments of radical political transformation or more ordinary moments of political action—in some of the discourses that political theory offers us through which to navigate the enthusiasms and disappointments of the contemporary world. To do this and to begin to construct an alternative, I turn to Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition—perhaps surprisingly, because Arendt herself is often thought to exemplify just the way of thinking I hope to question. Doesn’t Arendt offer us one of postwar political theory’s most vivid accounts of the evisceration of genuine politics in an age of consumer capitalism? And doesn’t she lighten that bleak picture by reminding us of the irrepressible spontaneity of human action, of the power of human beings to break with the given and—in a flash—make a new beginning? Yes and no. For all the importance of Arendt’s account of political action as a new beginning, we misunderstand that account when we see it as a matter of making a leap, in a moment, out of the stuckness of the present and into a radically different future: that kind of representation of action is not empowering but paralyzing. For Arendt, by contrast, the primary way we experience action is not by finding our way to it when it is absent, but by finding ourselves in the midst of it when we or others have already begun—a locution, notice, that already implies that action has a duration; that it is not just a moment, but a course. We could begin to capture this idea by saying that the moment of political action has always already passed; in fact, as I’ll explain, Arendt herself seems to say something like this. But it is critical not to read that maxim simply as a relocation of the moment of politics from the present or future into some specific time in the past, which would maintain our investment in a problematic picture of the punctuality, the suddenness, of genuine political events.7 And it is equally important not to read that maxim mournfully, as though it were the mark of a perennially missed opportunity or a sign that we’ve always already lost the thing we need.8

Three Uses of “Power” My attempt here to reorient our thinking about politics away from the the- matics of the moment is one part of a larger effort to identify and explore 116 Patchen Markell

a dimension of human agency that political theorists too often neglect. We argue about the criteria of agency, about its conditions of possibility, about how to achieve or expand it when it seems threatened, and so on, but these discussions take place mostly against a certain taken-for-granted background picture of what agency is and why it matters, in which agency is treated as a kind of control over the content and direction of what gets done. Agency, in this sense, can make the difference between being directed by one’s own desire or will or interest and being subjected to someone or something else.9 As I have argued elsewhere, the trouble with this picture is less that it is wrong— agency does matter in just this way—than that it is incomplete. We can ask whether an action is controlled by my will or interests or someone else’s, but we can also ask: Whatever it is that’s happening, however it’s being directed, does the carrying-out of this course of action depend on my participation, on my own activity? Does it happen through me, or does it proceed without my involvement?10 (Think here of Alexis de Tocqueville’s dystopic portrait of democratic despotism in the second volume of Democracy in America, in which an immense power “works willingly for [our] happiness” but wants to be not only “the only arbiter” of that happiness—the decider—but also, Tocqueville says, its “sole agent,” thereby relieving us of both the “trouble of thinking and the difficulty of living.”)11 My intuition is that our tendency to reduce questions of agency to questions of control has an affinity with our tendency to frame action in terms of the moment because decision and will, the instrument and medium of control par excellence, are so easily conceived of in punctual terms.12 Conversely, my hope is that Arendt’s displacement of the moment of action from the center of our attention might help bring this other dimension of concern about agency—the dimension of involvement—into the foreground, opening up a range of new questions about political action and drawing our attention to some features of contemporary political life that might otherwise escape our notice. A transformation of our thinking about agency along these lines would have reverberations across a whole region of our political and theoretical vocabulary, but in what follows I want to focus on one idea that comes from the same conceptual neighborhood as action and agency—the idea of power.13 I focus on power in part because many of our existing uses of the term fit all too smoothly with the notion of action as something momentary. Consider three examples. The first is well exemplified by the so-called power debate in political science that ran from the 1950s into the 1970s and beyond. That debate, whose first period culminated in the publication The Moment Has Passed 117

of Steven Lukes’s classic book Power: A Radical View in 1974, started as a controversy over whether postwar American social and political life could be said to be dominated by the leaders of an increasingly tightly intertwined network of corporate, political, and military institutions, from which the relatively passive masses remained alienated, or whether, instead, Ameri- can institutions distributed influence reasonably well across a wide variety of organized constituencies, all of whom competed within the limits of a general consensus on the biggest political questions.14 The “three faces of power” to which Lukes famously referred were, in effect, three different answers to a single methodological question about how one ought to judge between these two pictures of postwar America: Is it enough to ask which actors exercise the greatest influence in concrete, consequential political decisions? Must we also take into account the power of some actors to shape the agenda of decision making, to take certain issues and possibilities off the table? Or must we also, as Lukes argued, consider the power of some actors and, more broadly, of institutions and social structures and cultural forms to shape people’s perceptions of their interests in ways that preclude whole axes of political conflict from surfacing in the first place? Although the participants in the “power debate” held radically different views of the nature of contemporary American political life, they also shared something important that, for my purposes, makes all the theories of power that circulated in these arguments into instances of a single way of using the language of power. As subsequent critics pointed out, the debate was in effect an intramural argument about how to identify and measure what came to be labeled “power-over”—that is, the ability of some agents to exercise control or influence over others, or at least over a decision or course of action in a situation of actual or potential conflict with others about what is to be done.15 That association of power with inequality didn’t always sit well with theorists who were interested in democratic distribu- tions of power or in the possibility that power might arise in a bottom-up way, out of horizontal practices of cooperation. But what else could “power” mean? As Lukes had noted, there is a way of using the language of power that seems irreducible to the three faces of “power-over,” in which “power” has the general sense of “capacity,” “facility,” or “ability”; but at least in the first edition of his book, Lukes held this second sense of “power,” which he labeled “power-to,” at a distance, asserting—quite puzzlingly, in view of its long Aristotelian lineage—that it was “out of line with the central meanings of ‘power’ as traditionally understood.”16 Thirty years later, under pressure 118 Patchen Markell

from critics, Lukes changed his tune, agreeing that “power-over” had to be conceived as a subset of “power-to,” a specific configuration or distribution of human capacities, although he still gave the impression that the real political interest of the phenomenon of power lay in the power of some over others.17 Yet this second way of using the language of power was hardly satisfying to theorists who wanted to be able to break more radically with the traditional association of power with hierarchy and inequality. And so a number of other theorists—including many working outside this particular intel- lectual tradition in postwar social science—took something like the idea of “power-to” in a different direction, constituting a third family of uses of the language of power. For these theorists, you might say, though they do not all use this language themselves, “power-to” is not simply the Aristotelian genus of which Weberian “power-over” is one species. Instead, for them, “power” names a partial or wholesale alternative to power-over, a different way of configuring social and political relations that stands in direct opposition to the hierarchical image of power as a kind of sovereign command and control. Hardt and Negri’s radical democratic theory offers one influential example of this move, drawing on Spinoza’s distinction between potestas (constituted or authorized power or privilege, exemplified by the jurisdic- tion of a sovereign over his subjects) and potentia (the intrinsic power to be and to do expressed in the concrete activities of all beings).18 So far, this sounds close to Lukes’s version of the distinction between “power-over” and “power-to”; indeed, Lukes himself had used Spinoza’s terms to help expli- cate that distinction, and Hardt and Negri’s identification of potentia as the constituent power out of which relations of authorized or constituted power emerge echoes Lukes’s notion of “power-over” as a specific configuration of a more general category of “power-to.”19 Yet Hardt and Negri go further, for they treat potentia not only as a metaphysical category—the boundless field of activity out of which all constituted powers are produced—but also as a political category, associated, in familiar Marxian fashion, with one side of an antagonism and one party to a struggle: the struggle of a bottom-up democracy of the multitude against the top-down hierarchies of empire and capitalism.20 Nevertheless—and this is the key point—even as they break more radically with the notion that political power is necessarily “power- ov e r,” Hardt and Negri remain invested in an image of politics and power as centered on a moment: not, in this case, the moment of hierarchical control, but rather the revolutionary moment at which the multitude switches phase, reclaiming active possession of its own power from the hierarchies that The Moment Has Passed 119

have hijacked it.21 Thus, perhaps unsurprisingly, they point to the upsurge of resistance to authoritarian domination in North Africa and the Middle East in January and February 2011 as an epiphany of the multitude, a con- frontation of potestas by a potentia that belongs to a centerless many; and, more recently, they have interpreted Occupy Wall Street along similar lines as an announcement that “now [is] perhaps the moment” to consider our existing form of democracy “obsolete.”22 Now, readers of Hannah Arendt’s political theory often grasp her concept of power in terms broadly similar to those in which I have described Hardt and Negri’s idea of the power of the multitude: it is the bottom-up, democratic, antihierarchical alternative to power-over.23 But I think this view is a mistake; I think we ought to find her use of the term “power” much stranger and more puzzling than we often do; and I think that we can both understand and relieve that puzzlement by seeing how Arendt’s distinctive way of using this term in The Human Condition is bound up with her resistance to the framing of action in terms of moments. Just as Arendt gives us a picture of action as something with a course and duration, which we are drawn into after it has already begun, she also detaches the term “power” from its usual location in or prior to a moment of action, dissociates it from the moment of the projection of a will into the future and from the moment of the actualization of a capacity, and relocates it, instead, in the backward-looking relation of an agent to the contexts or settings of actions already taken or already under way—contexts and settings that sustain (or fail to sustain) the agent’s involvement, his sense that a situation calls for his attention and participation. In doing this, Arendt does not so much give us a new and distinctive theoretical account of a familiar object as use a familiar word to draw attention to phenomena that simply aren’t part of the way most of us employ the language of power; and for that reason alone, what I have just said about her use of “power” should sound obscure; but it and its implica- tions should become clearer as I proceed.

The Puzzle of Power in The Human Condition It’s not difficult to understand why we might be tempted to read Arendt herself as a theorist of politics and action who sees those phenomena in terms of moments. The Human Condition has long been treated as one of the twentieth century’s classic accounts of the modern displacement of authentic political life in favor of a mode of governance devoted to the ef- 120 Patchen Markell

ficient administration of social needs, which demands of its beneficiaries (for they are no longer properly understood as citizens) not action, but “sheer automatic functioning.”24 At the same time, Arendt avoids concluding The Human Condition on a note of despair, although only barely: just a page after warning that the modern age “may end in the deadliest, most sterile passivity history has ever known,” she asserts, almost cheerfully, that, “need- less to say, this does not mean that modern man has lost his capacities or is on the point of losing them” (322–23). The ease of that affirmation seems to reflect Arendt’s faith in the “fact of natality,” which she calls “the miracle that saves the world”: it is “because they are initium, newcomers and begin- ners by virtue of birth,” that “men take initiative,” starting something new “which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened before” (247, 177–78). To attempt to give an account of the ground of this miracle would be to betray its spontaneity: on this reading, Arendtian action is simply a groundless irruption of the extraordinary, and this is what makes it simultaneously so unreliable, in the sense that it cannot be counted on to appear at any particular time, and so resilient, in the sense that its appearance can never be ruled out.25 What Arendt teaches us most of all, it would seem, is that the moment of action will never arrive as long as we investigate it in the manner of third-person observers, asking about its conditions of possibility: as Hanna Pitkin puts it, “if you wait for your own action to befall you, it will not; you have to just do it.” 26 Arendt’s idea of power in The Human Condition may also seem to fit with this celebration of the spontaneous moment of action. In her first postwar work of political theory, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt had used the term “power” in the conventional sense of “power-over.” Pointing to Hobbes as the central theorist of power, she used the word to refer to what she called “accumulated control,” a means of achieving a desired end, and she argued that the infinite expansion of the accumulated means of control came to be seen as an end in itself in the era of imperialist “power politics.”27 Over the next several years, however, Arendt’s way of thinking about power changed, and by the time of The Human Condition her talk about power often makes it sound as if she means “power-to,” understood as a full-blown alternative to “power-over.”28 She draws sharp distinctions between “power” on the one hand and phenomena such as rule, force, and violence on the other. She insists that power “cannot be stored up and kept in reserve for emergencies, like the means of violence,” and she characterizes it as a kind of horizontal “potentiality in being together” that emerges when people “act together” or The Moment Has Passed 121

“act in concert” and that is destroyed when it is monopolized, treated like a quantifiable resource, or buttressed with physical force (200–201).29 Indeed, she describes the power that could emerge in the course of nonhierarchical collective action with a kind of lyricism that was a critical source of her appeal to the Left in the 1960s: “Power is actualized only when word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities” (200). More recently, that same lyricism has led some observers to parse the recent revolutions in the Arab world in Arendtian terms as a fragile, momentary upsurge of the horizontal power of the people—one could almost as easily have said “of the multitude”—in resistance to violent authoritarian regimes.30 They just did it. The trouble, however, is that if we read Arendt in this way as a theorist of the groundless, spontaneous moment of action, critical parts of her treatment of the concept of power actually become illegible. Indeed, Arendt’s treatment of power in the section of The Human Condition’s chapter on action called “Power and the Space of Appearance” is one of the parts of the book that only become more puzzling upon repeated rereading. Here’s the problem: On the one hand, Arendt uses the idea of power there in ways that seem perfectly consonant with its ordinary connotation of a capacity or potentiality to perform some activity: she says, for instance, that “power is what keeps the public realm, the potential space of appearance between acting and speaking men, in existence”; and again that “without power, the space of appearance brought forth through action and speech in public will fade away as rapidly as the living deed and the living word” (200, 204). In this sense, power appears to be a condition of the possibility of action—dunamis to action’s energeia, to use Aristotelian terms, as Arendt herself does (200). That might seem to make the concept of power useful in accounting for the emergence of a moment of political action, but of course the trouble is that Arendt’s emphasis on the groundlessness and miraculousness of action would seem to make any such explanatory account of action’s conditions of possibility not just superfluous, but positively unwelcome. As Arendt herself would write much later in The Life of the Mind, “The view that everything real must be preceded by a potentiality as one of its causes implicitly denies the future as an authentic tense.”31 So, on the other hand, Arendt also characterizes power as something that “exists only in its actualization”—a stance that sounds akin to the “Megarian” 122 Patchen Markell

claim, rejected by Aristotle in the Metaphysics, that “something is capable [dunasthai] only when it is acting [energê] .” 32 That sort of characterization, to be sure, reconciles Arendt’s understanding of power with her claims about the groundlessness of action, but it also creates an interpretive problem of its own, for it makes it difficult to understand the point of her extensive discussion of power. If “power cannot be stored up and kept in reserve for emergencies, like the instruments of violence, but exists only in its actualization,” and if “power springs up between men when they act together and vanishes the moment they disperse” (200)—that is, if it is perfectly congruent with action—then what is “power” but a synonym for action, and why has Arendt bothered to try to salvage the term for her own theoretical vocabulary, especially since its conventional use seems to run counter to her own purposes? To respond to these questions, we need to suspend the reading of Arendt simply as a theorist of the moment of ungrounded spontaneity and to back up and ask what else she might be doing in The Human Condition’s account of action.

Arendt and the Kairos Answering that question requires saying something, however briefly, about Arendt’s overall approach in The Human Condition. I take it that the central purpose of The Human Condition—the purpose that threads together most of its parts—is neither simply to offer a historical explanation for such phenomena as the “rise of the social” and the concomitant displacement of politics and action (though Arendt occasionally does make historical claims) nor simply to evaluate these developments with the help of a free-standing political ontology articulated straightforwardly in Arendt’s own voice (though there are moments when she does this sort of thing too). Rather, Arendt’s overarching concern in The Human Condition is to understand the terms in which we—which is to say, roughly, anyone whose political vocabulary has been shaped by what she calls the “tradition of Western political thought”—think and discuss and evaluate our own social and political lives.33 She wants to do this not because she thinks that ideas and discourse are all that matter in the end, but because she believes that important elements of the vocabulary provided by this tradition actually obscure the significance of the phenomena to which we apply them—or, more precisely, that they illuminate certain aspects of these phenomena while, or by, obscuring others. One might therefore think of The Human Condition as telling two stories in The Moment Has Passed 123

parallel: one, extending back to the ancient Greek world, tracks the development of this tradition of political thought, of its terms and concepts in their structured relations to each other; the other, with its center of gravity in modernity, tracks such phenomena as the development of modern science and the ascendance of capitalism and the nation-state. Arendt’s real interest is less in either of these stories for its own sake than in the relationship between them, not in the sense that she wishes to use developments in one story to explain developments in the other, but in the sense that she wishes to understand how and why the political vocabulary she tracks in the first story has kept us from fully understanding the significance of the events and developments in the second. These points of confusion and blindness in our own ongoing activity of making sense of our world, you might say, are the most important objects of what in the prologue to The Human Condition Arendt famously calls her attempt to “think what we are doing” (5). The most important of the blind spots that Arendt investigates in the chapter on action in The Human Condition is the traditional tendency to see all political relationships as vertical relationships of rulership and obedi- ence rather than as horizontal relationships of mutual dependence between actors and the “other acting beings” with whom they share a world (190). This interpretation of politics, Arendt argues, expresses an ultimately futile wish to “escape from the frailty of human affairs into the solidity of quiet and order” (222). To expose this interpretation and its consequences, she tells her readers what may by now be a familiar story about the transformation of the meaning of two words—archein and prattein—through which the Greeks talked about action. Originally, Arendt says, archein and prattein had the senses of “to begin” and “to achieve,” respectively; they referred not to two different acts or categories of action, but to the two complementary and interdependent parts of a single act, its initiation and its completion, and the complementarity between the words figured the horizontal interdependence among the several actors whose participation was needed to see a course of action through (189–90). The tradition of political thought, however, react- ing against the vulnerability involved in this sort of horizontal relationship, turned the relationship on its side, giving archein the sense of “to rule” and allowing prattein, which came to be the “accepted word for action in general,” to be understood in terms of the execution of commands (189, 222–23). The result was that “the most elementary and authentic understanding of human freedom disappeared from political philosophy” (225).34 In this context, the most interesting thing about this story is the role 124 Patchen Markell

played in it by Plato and specifically by Plato’s Statesman, which Arendt calls the locus of the “most fundamental version of the escape from action into rule,” and this is because what Arendt regards as the critical passage in the Statesman turns out to have everything to do with the idea of a moment of action (222). The passage comes late in the dialogue, when the Eleatic Visitor, having pursued the method of division in pursuit of the form of knowledge and expertise characteristic of the statesman, hypothesizes that the reason he and his interlocutors have not yet tracked down the statesman is that all of the various kinds of knowledge they have considered so far are related to particular domains of action, whereas the statesman stands above and rules them all. “For what is really kingship,” the Visitor says, “must not itself perform practical tasks [prattein], but control those with the capacity to perform them [archein tôn dunametôn prattein], because it knows when it is the right time [egkairias] to begin and set in motion the most important things in cities and when it is the wrong time; and the others must do what has been prescribed for them.”35 What the ruler knows, in this passage, is the moment of action, the kairos—a heavily weighted term whose accumulated associations, by the time of Arendt’s work on The Human Condition, included everything from the idea of the “opportune moment” to speak or the specific demands of an “occasion,” in classical rhetoric, to the interruption of chronological time by the arrival of the messianic event heralded in Paul’s epistles, to the moment of existential resoluteness in Heidegger’s Being and Time—among other things.36 If Arendt’s objection to this tradition of political philosophy is, in effect, that it uses the notion of the kairos—understood as the object of a distinctive kind of philosophically informed knowledge separate from and hierarchically related to the skills of those who actually carry things out—to subordinate the mortal time of human action to the eternity experienced in philosophical contemplation, then you might expect her to respond by reclaiming that concept for human action.37 Rather than mark the point of contact between ordinary human time and divine eternity, the kairos could represent a critical juncture within human time itself: the moment of the irruption of action within the everyday world of labor and work, a moment of beginning rather than of ruling, and therefore a moment available in principle to anyone rather than the basis for the subjection of most people to the few who know.38 In fact, this is exactly what Hardt and Negri do: when they talk about the moment at which the multitude organizes itself into a political subject in order to generate a transformative event, they refer to it The Moment Has Passed 125 explicitly as “the kairos of the multitude” or “the opportune moment that ruptures the monotony and repetitiveness of chronological time.”39 Curiously, however, for all of Arendt’s emphasis on beginning, she does not deploy the concept of the kairos or the language of the moment in quite this way. She does use the phrase “the moment of action” at significant junctures; but with the exception of one passing characterization of action early in the book as a matter of “finding the right words at the right moment” (26),40 her use of the term “moment” in connection with action in The Human Condition is never prospective, but always retrospective. That is, she does not treat the “moment of action” from the point of view of an agent poised for action, coiled in that moment of anticipatory tension in which the agent waits for just the right conditions before springing into motion; nor does she consider the phrase from the perspective of the agent in the unconditioned moment of emergence into a deed. Instead, she speaks repeatedly of the moment of action as something “fleeting” that has already “passed” (173, 192, 198, 201). Why? What accounts for Arendt’s marked refusal to talk about the moment of action in anticipatory terms? The answer, I think, lies in the fact that, for all the importance of Platonic and post-Platonic political philosophy in Arendt’s story about the displacement of action and freedom by rulership, her story does not actually begin with the tradition of political philosophy, but rather, surprisingly enough, with the prephilosophical self-understanding and ideology of the Athenian polis—that is to say, the self-understanding and ideology with which Arendt is often understood to be unproblematically aligned.41 Notwithstanding the deep gap between politics and philosophy that opened (as Arendt repeatedly reminds us) with the trial and execution of Socrates, there are also profound if subterranean continuities between this philosophical tradition and the political life it sought to supplant, the most important of which is the com- mitment to the superiority of a single domain of human activity—whether action or contemplation—that is defined by the exclusion of everything below it.42 If, as Arendt says, “the enormous weight of contemplation in the traditional hierarchy has blurred the distinctions and articulations within the vita activa itself,” thereby contributing to the neglect of the distinctiveness and value of action and politics, this was only a radicalization of a tendency already present in the ideology of the Greek polis, which had already blurred the all-important distinction between labor and work by reducing both to interchangeable instances of nonaction (17, 81–85).43 What these details suggest is that The Human Condition is not simply a 126 Patchen Markell

straightforward story of the destruction of a once-thriving practice of political action by the rise of political philosophy, but, in part, an ironic story in which the very terms through which Athenians understood action and expressed its value contributed to its eventual eclipse. I think this perspective can help make sense of a great deal of what is puzzling in the chapter titled “Action,” including especially the curious equivocality of Arendt’s treatment of the Athenian political tradition. That tradition is neither the standard by which she evaluates the modern world nor a model she flatly opposes. For better and for worse, it is, simply, a powerful constituent of her (and our) horizons of thinking about action and politics: a matter of fact that it would make no sense to deny, but whose significance Arendt wants at least to understand.44 And the lesson she takes from her own story, I think, can in turn help make sense of her curiously retrospective treatment of the “moment of action,” for it explains why she might resist simply detaching the idea of the kairos from its association with the eternal and recasting it as the moment of the spontaneous emergence of free action out of the mire of necessity. To do that and only that would merely reproduce a structure of thought that had helped create the conditions of the possibility of its own decline. So Arendt goes a step further. Even as she restores to archein its association with beginning rather than with rule, she also emphasizes the fleetingness and pastness of the moment of action, thereby bringing the second term in that old pair of verbs, archein and prattein, into the foreground. By stressing the dependence of beginning on what comes after it—not “executing” in a mechanical sense, but completing, continuing, carrying through—Arendt subtly transforms the problem of action, replacing the question of how to generate something out of nothing with the question of how to sustain or intensify or inflect a fragile course or history of action that has already begun.45

Power-After Where does that leave us with respect to the problem we encountered earlier in Arendt’s treatment of power in The Human Condition? That problem, remember, centered on the fact that power as she describes it—something that “exists only in its actualization” and “vanishes the moment [men] disperse”—seems to be a redundant concept, adding nothing to the idea of action itself (200). But having brought the retrospectivity of Arendt’s characterizations of the “moment of action” into view, I think we can now see the function of her concept of power more clearly. Here, we have to look The Moment Has Passed 127 more closely at what Arendt actually says in the section “Power and the Space of Appearance” in the chapter on action in The Human Condition. There, she does indeed write that “power springs up between men when they act together”—which means that it can’t precede and explain the initiation of an action. Yet she does not quite say that power disappears when the action stops; instead, she says that it vanishes the moment people “disperse” (201). Although it is easy to pass over this point, it is apparently meant to distinguish power from the “space of appearance,” which, it seems, does disappear as soon as the action stops: at the beginning of the section, Arendt writes that “the space of appearance comes into being wherever men are together in the manner of speech and action,” and then she adds: “Its peculiarity is that, unlike the spaces which are the work of our hands, it does not survive the actuality of the movement which brought it into being, but disappears not only with the dispersal of men . . . but with the disappearance or arrest of the activities themselves” (199, emphasis added). So it turns out that power is not quite redundantly congruent with action after all: it is as though we were looking at the wrong end of an action, looking for a little bit of power to exist in the split second before an action starts. But Arendt breaks with this anticipatory perspective on action—that is, the perspective of someone poised for action, waiting for the right moment, ready to actualize a capacity, looking forward to exercising control over the future, or on the edge of breaking out of the mire of unfreedom and necessity and into the new. In her use, power does not precede and explain action, but it does survive or outlast it; it is, as she says, what “keeps people together after the fleeting moment of action has passed” (201, emphasis added). It is something like a shadow cast into the future by action; and if we hear the phrase “the fleeting moment of action” as a reference specifically to what Arendt calls action’s “first part,” its initiation, then we might understand this shadow as that which gives action duration, what draws out a spontaneous flash of novelty on the part of a single agent (archein) into a course of action in which others—some of the lingering, undispersed witnesses to the initial event—join and extend and continue (prattein). This is not “power-over,” and it’s not exactly “power-to,” in the sense of an unrealized agentic potentiality waiting for the opportunity to spring forth. It’s more like the sort of power we have in mind when we talk about the power of an image or a phrase or a scene to hold our attention even once it has faded or receded. Notice that power in this sense—as something like the bond that holds people in a relation of presence and attention to each other and to some 128 Patchen Markell aspects of their world—is not possessed by agents. Readers of Arendt and others who want to mark their distance from traditional, Weberian associations between power and hierarchy often make the same claim about “power-to,” but the point generally turns out to mean something weaker. Either it means that, analytically speaking, the “possessive individual” isn’t the ultimate source of power because the powers that particular agents have can be explained only by reference to their position in larger relations and structures that enable them to do certain things and not others, or it means that power properly understood cannot be monopolized by a single agent because power depends on horizontal interactions among individuals—but it does not mean that power can’t be “possessed” in a certain sense by a collective agent, such as “the people” or “the multitude.” Power in Arendt’s sense as I’ve interpreted it here, however, is even less tightly tied to agents than this, in part because it is less tightly connected to prospective actions than in any of the other senses of power we have encountered. One way to mark this feature of Arendt’s use of “power” might be to ascribe power in this sense to situations rather than to agents. We already do this in a different sense when we talk about a particular scene or situation being “charged”: people have gathered, something has happened, and in the seconds or minutes or hours during which people remain engaged with each other and with the force of this event, we say things such as “the situation is tense” or “taut” or “fraught” or “crackling with possibility.” But that way of talking about the power of a situation—although it captures something quite real—is still quite forward looking and anticipatory, whereas Arendt helps us see that such situations are also powerful in a different sense: their very existence as situations is an expression of the power of the past—or, more exactly, of a past that is not quite finished, that has a kind of momen- tum through the people who find themselves engaged with it. We might underscore this point by ascribing power in this sense not just to a situation as a “context within which something consequential seems bound to happen,” but also to whatever it is that is the focus of people’s attention in that situation—to an event, for instance, that we might describe as “powerful” in something like the same way that we talk about a work of art as being “powerful”: we mean that it holds us in its presence. Of course, that way of talking can begin to sound as if it’s drawing us back to the language of “power-over,” whose metaphorics of command we sometimes apply to the feeling of compulsion that comes with an encounter with a powerful work; but the metaphor is imperfect since things that command our attention in The Moment Has Passed 129 this sense need not necessarily demand anything in particular from us; we need not thereby be treated as the means for the carrying-out of someone else’s will—although aesthetic power can be used as a means in just this sense, as it is in propaganda. Or, again, since events don’t simply appear to us in an unmediated way, we might also ascribe power in this sense to those things—they could be institutions; they could be features of the physical world, including the built environment—that organize our attention and let events get a grip on us. This, finally, raises a question about whether the sense of “power” I’ve been trying to draw out of Arendt is really all that distinctive. Given what I have just said about the idea of a powerful or charged situation, one might object that there’s really no difference between power in this sense and the conventional sense of power as capacity or possibility other than a shift in aspect or, better, of rhythmic emphasis. It’s fine to say that Arendtian power comes after the fleeting moment of action has passed, but in an ongoing series of actions, isn’t that which comes after one act or event also that which comes before and enables future acts and events? In a very general sense, this is right, and in fact it is entailed, I think, by the very idea of a “course of activity.” But at another level these senses of power remain irreducible to each other, and so we still gain something by, as it were, turning the beat around and putting the emphasis on power’s posteriority. When we conceive of power as “power-to,” we’re drawn to see the relationship between power and the acts it precedes as relatively tight and direct, indeed as causal or, in some contexts, even definitional. We talk about power in this sense as a power to do or accomplish this or that particular thing: to move one’s arms, to play the flute, to drive a car, and so on—or, in the specialized Weberian sense of “power-over,” to win the battle. But the power that holds people together and organizes their attention isn’t related to future actions in quite this way. It’s not tied to specific future actions as a matter of definition, and although you could probably incorporate it into a causal analysis as a “necessary but insufficient condition of possibility,” that’s not where its real interest lies: that power would be necessary for too many possible subsequent actions and too severely insufficient for any one of them to be of much interest in that kind of inquiry, which may be why it hasn’t received much attention. Instead, its importance lies in the fact that it sets the scene for what happens next, and that relationship of scene setting is more like a dative, a giving-to, than like an accusative, a doing-to.46 One might even say that the accusative is the proper case of control, and the dative the case of involvement. 130 Patchen Markell

The Duration of Politics What would it mean for the study of politics to think of power and action in these Arendtian terms and not only in terms of moments of power-over or actualizations of power-to? Arendt’s way of thinking could shed a very different light on phenomena that we are often currently inclined to think of as fleeting or momentary surges of horizontal power. I have already mentioned the case of the events of early 2011 in the Arab world, which have been interpreted both by theorists of the multitude and by Arendtians, among others, in just these terms: as miraculous moments of power-to asserting itself against the dominance of authoritarian power-over—and then, one might be tempted to add, fading from the scene as quickly as it erupted, whether because of the challenges of consolidating a new order (where the old structures of power-over begin to reassert themselves) or because of the displacement of these events from the international media by the Japanese earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear catastrophe and then by the Libyan intervention. But what seems to me quite striking about this representation is that it collapses the duration of these events into an in- stant—and this cannot just be a matter of the shift in historical scale imposed by retrospect because these theoretical interventions were made in the midst of the events themselves. The problem with this representation is twofold. It tends to present those events as utterly spontaneous, overlooking their connections to movements and organizations of relatively long standing such as the April 6 movement in Egypt—a tendency that was exacerbated by Western commentators who sought to cultivate sympathy abroad for the demonstrations by presenting them as utterly disconnected from the most familiar preexisting opposition organization, the Muslim Brother- hood.47 And it overlooks both the duration even of the events subsequent to, say, Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation as well as the importance of their duration to their power in the more conventional sense. One of the most striking things about the demonstrations in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, for example, was simply that they continued, even when many observers thought, whether with hope or with fear, that they were sure to dissipate in the face of violence or the threat of violence or simple exhaustion. Indeed, they lasted long enough that the demonstrators had to improvise ways of organizing the performance of the rhythmic tasks associated with the maintenance of the human body—feeding, disposing of waste—that more classical and austere versions of Arendtianism would exclude from politics: The Moment Has Passed 131

think, for example, of the videos of the crews of volunteers cleaning Tahrir Square that circulated at the time.48 Or think of a case that strikes me as strongly analogous: the wave of lunch-counter sit-ins that spread across the American South from Greens- boro in 1960. There, too, it has been conventional to refer to the sit-ins as spontaneous and to emphasize the speed with which they began and spread; and although scholarship on the history of the civil rights movement now often emphasizes these apparently spontaneous events’ dependence on earlier waves of organization and, in some cases, on more careful planning than had been publicly visible, what seems to me the obvious importance of duration to their phenomenology is still underplayed. Grouped with other forms of direct action such as marches and demonstrations and considered in retrospect, sit-ins appear to be significant because of the power-to (or even power-over) that was manifest in them: they got results. But, as in Tahrir Square, one of the things that was most striking about them as they were happening was that the students stayed and that, when they couldn’t stay any longer, they were relieved by others who had come to join them—to the frustration of the store managers who initially instructed their waitresses simply to ignore the students, expecting them to “become bored and leave.”49 Elizabeth Abel’s recent work on the visual politics of Jim Crow is unusually good on this point. Studying the archive of sit-in photographs taken by journalists and participants, she writes that the duration of the sit-ins meant that “the photographers who tracked the movement’s spread across the South had sufficient time and space to make deliberate compositional choices” and that they produced “relatively quiet images” in contrast to “the dramatic scenes of violence that were favored by the media”—images that combine, in varying proportions, the charge and tension of possible violence that hung over the sit-ins, on the one hand, and their prolonged ordinariness on the other, as the students, sometimes reading, sometimes writing in notebooks, sometimes seemingly doing nothing at all, “just sat—and sat—and sat.”50 Something similar could be said about Occupy Wall Street and the related occupations that have arisen across the United States and elsewhere since September 2011. Much discussion of the Occupy phenomenon has centered on the question of whether this movement can become more than momentary and whether, to do so, it needs to organize itself around a specific set of concrete political demands. These questions are not irrelevant, but they are curiously inattentive to the specific character of this phenomenon as an occupation, whose power, in Arendt’s sense—that is, its power to sus- 132 Patchen Markell

tain itself over time, to survive its “arrest” by the police or the weather, and to draw the attention of new participants and observers—had something to do with its initial site: a curious bit of space in Lower Manhattan, a park suspended between private ownership and public accessibility, whose hybrid status made it not just a symbol but an instance of the alliance of corporate and state power, simultaneously put on display and put under pressure by the occupiers’ ongoing presence.51 The question of demands or aims is important, but so too is the way in which this occupation reorganized political attention, orienting its participants and observers toward the invitation represented by the park’s public status; presenting them with an opportunity to take this invitation at its word and to test its limits; intensifying a sense of involvement that was and will be critical to the pursuit of whatever further decisions, goals, or demands come out of this improvised public space; and transforming—in its very existence and duration—its participants’ and observers’ sense of what is possible. Involvement is not control; what these events will give is not reducible to what they have done or will do. Finally, I think these considerations can inform some cautionary thoughts about the ways in which political theorists sometimes talk about and diagnose the phenomenon of the loss of “the political.” There is something perpetually appealing to political theorists, and probably not only us, about the narrative form of innocence, decline, and redemption. Part of its appeal, to be sure, is that its middle term—decline—provides a way of making sense of the real narrowing of political possibilities generated by such forces as capitalism. But part of its appeal, as I have suggested, is also that it is an anchor for theoretical authority, a way of positioning the theorist as the figure whose distinctively general insights, wide in social scope and long in historical scale, give him or her the unique power, half-philosophical and half-prophetic, if not to “giv[e] instruction as to what the world ought to be,”52 then at least to discern and announce the ways in which ordinary political actors’ doings succeed or fail at living up to a properly demanding political standard. One of the costs of this posture, however, is that it tends to produce accounts of a depoliticized present that are so stark as to seem to require a qualitative jump, in a moment, into another order of activity— a requirement that may consign political activity to failure even before it has begun. Although at the beginning of this essay I associated Hardt and Negri with theory in its “militant” mood, their work also shows how quickly the frame of the moment can pull theory from anticipatory enthusiasm into The Moment Has Passed 133

disappointment. Recall their suggestion that the power of the multitude is supposed to be simultaneously the ontological ground of the forms of potestas or “power-over” that already exist—so that the transformative activity of the multitude is entirely immanent to the social world as it is—and qualitatively different from imperial or capitalist domination, so that the power of the multitude can produce a radical break with the present. How are these imperatives to be held together? Hardt and Negri’s answer, in an echo of the Marxian distinction between class in-itself and class for-itself, is that “political organization is needed to cross the threshold and generate political events”; the multitude has to make itself into a “political subject” that can seize the “opportune moment” for action.53 But how can the multitude organize itself and still maintain its distinctively horizontal, antihierarchical character? That question immediately draws Hardt and Negri back into the all-too-familiar Leninist problematic of the relation between a disciplined, top-down party and a bottom-up movement (or, if you prefer a different literature, into the arguments among scholars and activists about the rela- tive merits of and tensions between two strategies pursued by a variety of social movements—trying to build long-lasting, formally structured mass membership organizations that can influence policy at decisive moments through official channels and trying to harness the energy of brief periods of discontent to produce momentary upsurges of disruption and resistance). Thus, although Hardt and Negri’s recent work repeatedly announces the need for a distinctive conception of organization appropriate to the multitude, it also repeatedly defers a full response to this problem.54 This is not surprising, for as long as the term “organization” is asked to perform a miraculous mediation between immanence and transcendence, simultaneously sharpening the multitude into a political subject capable of intervening in struggles over power in its Weberian sense and maintaining all the features of a bottom-up, fluidly networked power-to that is defined precisely by its difference from power-over, it seems likely only to serve as a name for a problem it can’t solve. Arendt has something to say about “organization” too, which at one point she treats as a synonym for “power”; but she comes at this concept from a different perspective (201). For her, organization is not the means by which we can discern or induce a moment of absolute transformation, by which we can flip a world that is supposedly thoroughly penetrated by late-modern state and corporate power into a world equally thoroughly penetrated by democratic virtue. Instead, starting in medias res—that is, in the 134 Patchen Markell

midst of a complex and contingent setting of events that are already under way—Arendt observes that what organization does is simply to maintain people in a relation of proximity to each other and to orient their attention, so that they don’t altogether “disperse,” as she puts it, as soon as the “fleeting moment of action” is over. Her example is the organized living-together of people in cities, not because a city is an organization in the formal sense of a complex body oriented toward the pursuit of some collective goal, whose functional differentiation and hierarchical integration intensify its power to realize that goal, but simply because city life creates a certain density of encounter among its inhabitants—which is not to deny but to emphasize the importance of the fact that its patterns of encounter are usually stri- ated and uneven along lines of class and race. The same point can be made about more informal modes of “movement organizing,” which, though of course they are usually oriented toward the achievement of some end, also produce (and depend on) certain patterns of relatively durable proximity and attention among their participants, such that even if a campaign fails to achieve its ends—fails to exercise power-over or power-to—the movement can nevertheless have succeeded in generating power of a different kind, a power that will be evident in the extent to which the failure will be felt and mourned and remembered in common. And it’s better, I think, to be able to find a kind of power—even a curiously weak and indeterminate one—in a moment of mourning a concrete political failure than to frame one’s aspirations in theoretical terms that write failure and mourning into the enterprise from the beginning. A practice of political theory that wishes to resist the temptations of this form of theoretical authority might begin by embracing the premise that the moment of action has not been lost but has merely passed.

Notes

Thanks to audiences at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science As- sociation, the conference “Waiting for the Political Moment” in Rotterdam and Utrecht in June 2010, the Princeton and Harvard Graduate Political Theory Conferences, and the Prindle Center and Department of Political Science at DePauw University for their feedback on earlier versions of these ideas. I’m especially grateful to Jane Mansbridge for her encouragement; to Cathy Cohen, Rom Coles, Andrea Frank, Jill Frank, David Owen, Becky Ploof, J. J. McFadden, Mark Reinhardt, Linda Zerilli, and Lena Zuckerwise for conversations about this paper; and to Becky Ploof for research assistance. The Moment Has Passed 135

1. Paul B. Farrell, “America’s Tahrir Moment,” Adbusters, September 6, 2011, http:// www.adbusters.org/blogs/adbusters-blog/occupy-wall-street-will-lay-siege-us-greed .html; “Nobody Can Predict the Moment of Revolution (Occupy Wall Street),” September 23, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwWInp75ua0; Peter Dreier, “Victory! Transforming Occupy Wall Street from a Moment to a Movement,” Huffington Post, Oc- tober 7, 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-dreier/rose-gudiel-_b_999514.html. 2. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in The Marx–Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1978), 484. 3. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Declaration (New York: Argo Navis, 2012), 1; Alain Badiou, The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings (London: Verso, 2012), 107. The latter’s cover image (by Goran Tomasevic) is identified and dated January 28, 2011, on the Reuters website, http://live.reuters.com/event/unrest_in_egypt?page=0 (accessed August 30, 2012). It is worth comparing this cover to that of Slavoj Žižek’s book The Year of Dreaming Dangerously (London: Verso, 2012), which also depicts a figure against a fiery background, this time in the form of a furiously burning car in Hackney during the UK riots of August 2011; here, however, the figure—who appears to have been inserted into the scene through photomontage—is Žižek himself (see http://www .versobooks.com/books/1161-the-year-of-dreaming-dangerously [accessed August 30, 2012]; although the background image is not readily available on the Web, it seems to be the same scene captured in the distinctly Žižek-less photograph at http://demotix.com/ news/783403/damage-caused-by-riots-and-looting-london#slide4 [accessed August 30, 2012]). However, Žižek’s self-insertion into the political scene is not necessarily an indication of unmitigated theoretical arrogance: for a suggestion of how Žižek, in the manner of an analyst, both nurtures and systematically frustrates his audience’s desire for authoritative theoretical pronouncements, see Jodi Dean, Žižek’s Politics (London: Routledge, 2006), xix–xx. See also Hardt and Negri’s account of “our political task” in relation to a coming but unpredictable event that will “completely reshuffle the decks of political powers and possibility” (Declaration, 102–4), and Badiou, Rebirth of History, 21, 108–9. Despite his affirmation of the importance of “truth,” it is important not to misunderstand Badiou as restoring the old hierarchy in which philosophy, by virtue of its special access to an (extrapolitical) truth, can govern and direct politics, a stance he eloquently criticizes (see, e.g., Alain Badiou, Metapolitics [London: Verso, 2005], chap. 1); for him, the authority of philosophy in relation to politics seems to lie in its capacity to verify the existence of events and truths, to certify their authenticity, by virtue of its own interest in them, which demonstrates their susceptibility to being thought (Metapolitics, 52–55, 152; cf. Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005], 9–15). Hence, his characteristic mode of philosophical intervention into politics lies not in telling political actors what to do, but in distinguishing events from nonevents: see, in addition to Rebirth of History, “‘We Need a Popular Discipline’: Contemporary Politics and the Crisis of the Negative,” Critical Inquiry 34 (Summer 2008): 658–59. Žižek does this too: see Slavoj Žižek, “Shoplifters of the World 136 Patchen Markell

Unite,” London Review of Books, August 19, 2011, http://www.lrb.co.uk/2011/08/19/ slavoj-zizek/shoplifters-of-the-world-unite. 4. Jeffrey C. Isaac, “The Strange Silence of Political Theory,” Political Theory 23, no. 4 (1995): 636–88. 5. Sheldon Wolin, “What Time Is It?” Theory & Event 1, no. 1 (1997): paras. 4–6, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v001/1.1wolin.html. See also Wolin’s account of the slow mode of political activity he calls “tending” in “Tending and Intending a Constitution: Bicentennial Misgivings,” in The Presence of the Past (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), e.g., 89. 6. On this understanding of democracy see Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision, exp. ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), chaps. 16–17; for a different account of the relation between the slow or “archaic” and the “fugitive” modes of democracy in Wolin’s work, see Steven Bilakovics, Democracy without Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), chap. 4. 7. This is one source of my dissatisfaction with Badiou’s analysis of events, notwithstanding my appreciation of his category of “fidelity,” which names the mode (I would rather say one mode) in which political subjects maintain an ongoing relation to (indeed, in which such subjects arise out of their relation to) events (see, e.g., Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil [London: Verso, 2001], chap. 4). By contrast and quite radically, Lauren Berlant writes duration into events from the beginning, seeing suddenness and punctuality as aspects of some but not all genres of “historical duration,” a move that gives her access to huge swaths of experience that are invisible when we take the flash to be the paradigm of a happening (Cruel Optimism [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011], 4). 8. My resistance here to a structure of thought energized by the necessity of failure is indebted to Libby Anker’s recent account of left melodrama, which also focuses (from a different though compatible angle) on Hardt and Negri, as well as to Wendy Brown’s earlier work on left melancholia: see Elisabeth Anker, “Left Melodrama,” Contemporary Political Theory 11, no. 2 (2012): 130–52; and Wendy Brown, “Resisting Left Melancholy,” boundary 2 26, no. 3 (1999): 19–27. For Brown, the trouble with a certain strand of left thought lies in its melancholic attachment to a lost moment when—the myth goes—a radical stance could be grounded in an analysis of class oppression not yet complicated by cultural politics or problematized by post-structuralism; for Anker, a related melodramatic attachment is visible in contemporary theory’s repetition of the melodramatic form of the Communist Manifesto. Another source of melancholy in left political theory, however, may lie in the tension between the impulse toward theoretical leadership and the impulse to deny oneself that form of hierarchical theoretical authority in the name of democracy or equality—a tension that can be managed if what the theorist produces is not a program of action, but an authoritative account of that program’s impossibility in the face of forces that dominate the theorist and the actor equally. 9. One of the most important and elaborate examples of this general view can be The Moment Has Passed 137 found in Philip Pettit, A Theory of Freedom: From the Psychology to the Politics of Agency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 10. For more on this distinction between control and involvement, and for an extended discussion of Pettit’s work, see Patchen Markell, “The Insufficiency of Non- domination,” Political Theory 36, no. 1 (2008): 9–36. 11. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Library of America, 2004), 818. 12. Here, this project intersects with Bonnie Honig’s account of the costs to political theory of an exclusive focus on the “moment of decision”; see Emergency Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). As in her earlier work, Honig here presses theorists to attend to what she calls the “aftermath” or “remainder” of moments of decision as well as to practices and stances that would allow people and polities to “survive” the tragic conflicts that generate those remainders (9). But in Emergency Politics and especially in the chapter on Franz Rosenzweig, Honig does more than this: she also draws attention to a range of phenomena—orientation, preparation, reception, prolongation, intensification, and others—that are critical to political life yet that exceed the framing of politics in terms of moments of decision (94, 140). 13. On “rule,” see Patchen Markell, “The Rule of the People: Arendt, Archê, and Democracy,” American Political Science Review 100, no. 1 (2006): 1–14. 14. Steven Lukes’s book Power: A Radical View (New York: Macmillan, 1974) was republished in an extensively expanded edition by Palgrave Macmillan in 2005; my references are to the 2005 edition. Also see C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), and Robert A. Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956). For Dahl’s critique of Mills, see his article “A Critique of the Ruling Elite Model,” American Political Science Review 52, no. 2 (1958): 463–69; for Dahl’s classic early statement on the meaning of “power,” see “The Concept of Power,” Behavioral Science 2, no. 3 (1957): 201–15. 15. This is nearly the sense that Max Weber gave to the term “Macht” (power): “the chance of a man or a number of men to realize their own will in a communal action even against the resistance of others who are participating in the action” (“Class, Status, Party,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946], 180). Although allowing that the term “Herrschaft” (domination) might be used synonymously with “Macht” in a “quite general sense,” Weber generally treated domination as a “special case of power,” in which the source of an agent’s power lies in the possession of the authoritative power of command associated with officeholding and rulership (Economy and Society, vol. 2 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978], 942–46). 16. Lukes, Power, 34. For a compelling argument that this notion of power as “capacity to do things” was fundamental to classical Greek political thought, see Josiah Ober, “The Original Meaning of ‘Democracy’: Capacity to Do Things, Not Majority Rule,” Constellations 15, no. 1 (2008): 3–9. 138 Patchen Markell

17. Lukes, Power, 69–74; see also Jeffrey C. Isaac, “Beyond the Three Faces of Power: A Realist Critique,” Polity 20, no. 1 (1987): 4–31, and Clarissa Rile Hayward, De-facing Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), esp. chap. 2. Lukes now distances himself from his earlier view that “the only important question is ‘Who whom?’” (Power, 109); for a stronger suggestion that this sort of power is the kind that matters to politics, see Raymond Geuss’s discussion of Lenin and power in Philosophy and Real Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 23–30. One might say that, for Foucault, the relation between these uses of “power” was best seen the other way around, focusing on the production of capacities or abilities in and through various forms of hierarchical power-over. The fundamentally Weberian starting point of Foucault’s use of “power,” which retained a tight connection to the exercise of power by some over others even as Foucault drew attention to power’s productive effects, can be seen (for instance) in Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Power, ed. James Faubion, vol. 3 of Essential Works of Foucault (New York: New Press, 1994), 327–48. 18. Negri’s most extended reading of Spinoza on power is in The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), esp. chap. 8. See also Michael Hardt, “Translator’s Foreword: On the Anatomy of Power,” in Negri, The Savage Anomaly, xi–xvi; for a briefer, free-standing treatment, see Antonio Negri, “The Political Treatise, or, the Foundation of Modern Democracy,” in Subversive Spinoza: (Un)contemporary Variations (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2004), 9–27. 19. Lukes, perhaps following Thomas Wartenberg, added a discussion of Spinoza to the expanded version of Power, 73–74; see Thomas Wartenberg, The Forms of Power: From Domination to Transformation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 23–24. Neither Lukes nor Wartenberg, however, sees this distinction in Spinoza as a way of zeroing in on the radically democratic constituent power of the people or the multitude, as did Negri. 20. See especially the trilogy by Hardt and Negri: Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004); and Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 21. See, for instance, Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 165–78. 22. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, “Arabs Are Democracy’s New Pioneers,” February 24, 2011, http://guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/24/arabs-democracy- latin-america. Malcolm Harris pointed to Egypt as a refutation of Bruce Robbins’s scathing review of Commonwealth in “The Multitude Claps with One Hand, Exodus in Egypt, and Other Musings on Insurrection,” destructural, February 1, 2011, http:// destructural.wordpress.com/the-multitude-claps-with-one-hand-exodus-in-egypt-and- other-musings-on-insurrection/; for Robbins’s review, see “Multitude, Are You There?” n+1, no. 10 (December 2010), http://nplusonemag/multitude-are-you-there; see also Hardt and Negri, Declaration. The quotes are from Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, “The Fight for Real Democracy at the Heart of Occupy Wall Street,” Foreign Affairs web- The Moment Has Passed 139 site, October 11, 2011, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/136399/michael-hardt- and-antonio-negri/the-fight-for-real-democracy-at-the-heart-of-occupy-wall-street. 23. See, among many others, Jane Mansbridge’s citation of Arendt as the represen- tative of the “nicer” idea of power-to, in opposition to coercive power-over, in “On the Importance of Getting Things Done,” PS: Political Science and Politics 45, no. 1 (2012): 4. 24. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 26; subsequent page references to this work are given parenthetically in the text. 25. For a reading of Arendtian politics in terms of extraordinariness, see Andreas Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); for a classic statement of the importance of groundlessness in Arendt’s conception of action, see Dana Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), esp. chap. 5. For an account of the concept of the miracle that resists this picture of “groundless irruption” and of extraordinariness, however, see Honig’s account of Franz Rosenzweig—with whom she also aligns Arendt—in Emergency Politics, chap. 4. 26. Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 284, emphasis added. 27. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Schocken, 2004), 184; on the shift in Arendt’s treatment of power from Origins to The Human Condition, see Hauke Brunkhorst, “The Productivity of Power: Hannah Arendt’s Renewal of the Classical Concept of Politics,” Revista de Ciencia Política 26, no. 2 (2006): 125–36. 28. Emphasizing the intersubjective nature of Arendtian power, Amy Allen has suggested the variation “power-with” rather than “power-to”: see The Power of Feminist Theory: Domination, Resistance, Solidarity (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1999), esp. chaps. 4–5. 29. The phrase “act in concert” is from Arendt’s later essay “On Violence,” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1972), 143. 30. For this phrase, see, for example, Samantha Balaton-Chrimes, “The Might of Power Facing up to the Violence of Strength—an Arendtian View of Politics and Revolution,” openDemocracy, February 2, 2011, http://www.opendemocracy.net/ samantha-balaton-chrimes/might-of-power-facing-up-to-violence-of-strength- arendtian-view-of-politics. 31. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, vol. 2: Willing (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 15. 32. Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book Theta, ed. and trans. Stephen Makin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 1046b29–30. I am indebted to Jill Frank for raising the question of Arendt’s apparent “Megarianism” with me and for many other discussions of Aristotle and Arendt. 33. As is now well known, this phrase was part of one of Arendt’s titles (“Karl Marx and the Tradition of Western Political Thought”) for the post-Origins project that she eventually transformed into The Human Condition. A basic chronology of her work 140 Patchen Markell can be found in Jerome Kohn’s introduction to Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics (New York: Schocken, 2005). 34. This paragraph moves quickly over terrain I discuss in more detail elsewhere: see Markell, “The Rule of the People,” 4–5. 35. Plato, Statesman, ed. and trans. C. J. Rowe (Warminster, UK: Aris & Phillips, 1995), 305d. Arendt quotes part of this passage in The Human Condition, 223. Her reading of the Statesman dates to very early in her conception of the post-Origins project that would become The Human Condition: the quoted passage is copied out and rendered in German in her notebooks from September 1950 (Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch, ed. Ursula Ludz [Munich: Piper, 2002], 28). 36. On rhetoric, see, for example, Philip Siporia, “Introduction: The Ancient Con- cept of Kairos,” in Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory, and Practice, ed. Philip Siporia and James S. Baumlin (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002); on St. Paul, see Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), chap. 4; on Heidegger, see (at two poles of an interpretive opposition about the significance of Heidegger’s use of the term “kairos”) John Van Buren, The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), chap. 13, and Hubert L. Dreyfus, “What Could Be More Intelligible Than Everyday Intelligibility? Reinterpreting Division I of Being and Time in the Light of Division II,” Bulletin of Science, Technology, and Society 24, no. 3 (2004): 265–74. On the significance of Heidegger’s use of the idea of the moment for political theory, see Oliver Marchart, Post-foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou, and Laclau (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2007), 21. 37. It might be possible to read this concern with timeliness in the Statesman as at least a partial retreat from the model of philosophical rulership usually associated with the Republic, in which political authority is grounded in knowledge earned through the contemplation of the unchanging and eternal ideas (see, for example, Julia Annas’s introduction to Plato, The Statesman, ed. Julia Annas and Robin Waterfield [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995], ix–x, xiii; but see also Melissa S. Lane, Method and Politics in Plato’s Statesman [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998], 1–6, 139–46). But Arendt doesn’t make this interpretive move, perhaps because she is as interested in the legacy of Plato and Platonism in the history of political thought as anything else. From that perspective, the Statesman’s separation and hierarchical rearticulation of knowledge and execution look like an anticipation of later Christian accounts of the subordination of the mortal world to an “eternal God” (The Human Condition, 18); and the uneasiness of Plato’s dialogue, in which he must simultaneously characterize the statesman as the bearer of theoretical knowledge, divorced from practice, and as the bearer of a technê, oriented toward the production of a concrete result, looks like a prefiguration of a long history of theological uncertainty about how to keep divinity at once utterly separate from and closely involved in human affairs. A similar The Moment Has Passed 141 problem will emerge in the Christian reception of Aristotelian metaphysics, in which the characterization of God’s activity as timeless, self-contained, and always already fully actualized—the highest and purest expression of energeia and entelecheia, to the point that it cannot even be understood as the activation of a previously unactualized dunamis—risks detaching God from the contingent and changing world that he must nevertheless be understood as creating and governing. On the uptake of Aristotelian metaphysics in Christianity, see David Bradshaw, Aristotle East and West: Metaphys- ics and the Division of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); for a detailed discussion of the ways in which Aquinas responds to the problems that might seem to be posed by the characterization of God as pure actuality, see Norman Kretzmann, The Metaphysics of Creation: Aquinas’s Natural Theology in Summa contra Gentiles II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), chaps. 2 and 4. 38. Reading Arendt in the spirit of a Benjaminian messianism of the ordinary, for instance, Oliver Marchart writes that for Arendt “the ‘time’ of politics, when it occurs, is—and is always—now” (“Time for a New Beginning: Arendt, Benjamin, and the Mes- sianic Conception of Political Temporality,” Redescriptions 10 [2006]: 147). Marchart’s reading rests in part on an appropriation of Arendt’s well-known phrase “between past and future” to characterize the time of action and politics; but as Marchart acknowledges, Arendt actually uses this phrase to describe our temporal location when we think, not to characterize the temporality of action (136). Marchart views this as an unfortunate hesitancy on Arendt’s part; here, I’m interested in understanding what this hesitation might have accomplished. 39. Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 165. 40. I have not yet found a direct classical antecedent for this familiar phrase, but it clearly echoes rhetorical invocations of timeliness or “fitness for the occasion” (kairos; e.g., Isocrates, “Against the Sophists,” in Isocrates, vol. 2, ed. George Norlin [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980], 171); it may also be informed by Aristotle’s account of virtue as marked by the experience of pleasures and pains “at the right time, toward the right objects, toward the right people, for the right reason, and in the right manner” (Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Ostwald [Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999], 2.6, 1106b20–23). 41. For a critique of this understanding, which has powerfully influenced my own reading of The Human Condition, see Roy Tsao, “Arendt against Athens: Rereading The Human Condition,” Political Theory 30, no. 1 (2002): 97–123; for some disagreements with Tsao, see the notes to my article “Arendt’s Work: On the Architecture of The Human Condition,” College Literature 38, no. 1 (2011): 16–44. 42. On the gap, see The Human Condition, 12, and (at much greater length) the chapter “Socrates” in The Promise of Politics, 5–39. 43. See also the chapter “Introduction into Politics” in The Promise of Politics, 131, where Arendt draws an analogy between Plato’s Academy, understood as a space whose participants could practice philosophy only once they were free from the cares of politi- 142 Patchen Markell cal life, and the Athenian polis, understood as a space whose participants could practice philosophy only once they were free from necessity. I discuss this point at greater length in “Arendt’s Work.” 44. I am tempted to describe Arendt’s stance toward the place of the Greeks in the tradition of political thought in the terms through which Arendt, in her response to Gershom Scholem, described her Jewishness: she called it one of the “indisputable facts” of her life (“unbezweifelbaren Gegebenheiten”; the English version of her response, produced by Arendt herself, is now most easily accessible in The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman [New York: Schocken, 2007], 466; for the German, see Hannah Arendt, Ich will verstehen: Selbstauskünfte zu Leben und Werk, ed. Ursula Ludz [Munich: Piper, 1996], 30). The interpretive tendency to read various parts of The Human Condition as, in the first instance, expressions of praise or blame, agreement or disagreement, advocacy or criticism seems to me to miss the matter-of-factness that characterizes Arendt’s voice across much of the book. 45. In an earlier article, I argued along similar lines that Arendtian action is difficult if not impossible to characterize in terms of simple presence or absence and that it might be better to speak of action as waxing and waning, coming into being and passing away (“The Rule of the People,” 10). There, however, I had not yet seen that Arendt’s characterization of beginning as a kind of responsiveness to events, whose character as a beginning depends in part on how others in turn respond to it, actually amounts to an elevation of prattein to its neglected position of parity, at least, with archein. 46. My use of the idea of a scene here is indebted to Paul Kottman, A Politics of the Scene (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), although Kottman—like many others—reads Arendt as endorsing a strong distinction between praxis and poiesis, a distinction that Kottman takes to be crucial to the definition of a scene, which he treats in opposition to artifactual phenomena, including, for instance, both the physical stage and the work that is performed upon it. As I have argued elsewhere, I take Arendt to be less interested in separating action from work than in recovering a different sense of work, one that allows its interdependence and interaction with action to come into view: see, for instance, Markell, “Arendt’s Work.” On Arendt’s own use of the idea of grammatical case to make sense of the differences and relations among aspects of the vita activa, see Patchen Markell, “Hannah Arendt and the Case of Poetry,” August 6, 2012, http://www.hannaharendtcenter.org/?p=6986. 47. For a much subtler account that emphasizes the complex internal differentiation within the Muslim Brotherhood, see Paul Amar, “The Sea of Shoes: Why Egypt’s Progressives Win,” Black Agenda Report, February 8, 2011, http://blackagendareport .com/content/sea-shoes-why-egypts-progressives-win. 48. On this point, see the concluding paragraph of Judith Butler’s “Bodies in Al- liance and the Politics of the Street,” a lecture given in Venice, September 7, 2011, and published online in Transversal, September 2011, http://eipcp.net/transversal/1011/ butler/en/. Although I would dissent from various aspects of Butler’s characterization The Moment Has Passed 143 of Arendt in this piece, her political phenomenology of Tahrir Square is compelling and unusual in its refusal to reduce that event to a moment. 49. Miles Wolff, Lunch at the 5 & 10, rev. and exp. ed. (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1990), 15 (characterizing the strategy of C. L. Harris, manager of the Greensboro Woolworth’s). 50. Elizabeth Abel, Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 253. The last phrase is quoted from L. F. Palmer Jr., “Series Reveal New Face of Young Negro America,” Chicago Defender, March 26, 1960. 51. McKenzie Wark is one of the few to have insisted on the phenomenological difference between an occupation and a movement; see “How to Occupy an Abstrac- tion,” Verso Books blog, October 3, 2011, http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/728- mckenzie-wark-on-occupy-wall-street-how-to-occupy-an-abstraction. Relatedly, see Mark Traugott’s study of the social functions of the barricade in French revolutionary politics, which attends not only to the barricade’s uses in combat, but also to the effects of the new forms and durations of physical proximity that the barricade made possible: The Insurgent Barricade (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), e.g., 184–85. 52. G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942), 12. 53. Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 165, emphasis added. 54. See, for example, ibid., 177–78, 246, 351, 356–57. For a good critical discussion of Hardt and Negri along these lines, see Benjamin Noys, The Persistence of the Nega- tive: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010). On social movements and organization, the classic source is Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977).