4 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 disappoint- ing 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 113 114 Patchen Markell 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 disap- pearance 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 impe- rial 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 pres- ent 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 involve- ment—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.