Living in Arendt’s World
Michael Denneny, the recently deceased co-founder and co-editor of the pioneering gay magazine Christopher Street , gay newspaper New York Native , and the gay publishing line at St. Martin’s Press, Stonewall Inn Editions, began his recently published collection of essays On Christopher Street with a quotation from his mentor, Hannah Arendt:
“Only in our speaking with one another does the world, as that about which we speak, emerge in its objectivity and visibility from all sides. Living in a real world and speaking with one another about it are basically one and the same.”
Denneny’s career as a gay cultural activist was a way of putting into practice Arendt’s thought as condensed in this citation. Across writings collected in On Christopher Street, which range in date from the beginnings of the magazine in 1976 to just before his death last year, he grounded his view of gay culture and politics in her work. Yet the importance of her example for their emergence—and of her philosophy to a key moment in the rise of what we now call “identity politics”—remains almost totally ignored in the field of gay history and in the ever-growing number of academic and popular reappraisals of Arendt. It is hardly known that her thinking and milieu were vital elements in intellectual matrix of the American gay movement.i
From academic and popular genealogies of gay identity and gay politics, whether written by progressive academics or conservatives pundits like Jamie Kirchick or Chris Rufo, readers could be forgiven for mistakenly believing misunderstanding that it was “radical” post-structuralist thinkers like Michel Foucault and Judith Butler who supplied that movement’s theoretical legitimation, resisted all the way by “mainstream” “assimilationists” (who are often portrayed by defenders and critics as anti-theoretical voices of “common sense”). Such genealogies misunderstand Foucault (who was much closer to the positions of Arendt and Denneny, an early champion of his, than to Butler and today’s “woke” activists)ii—although this is a subject for another essay. Moreover, they obscure the deep, and deeply Arendtian, thinking behind the cultural and political work that brought gay male life towards the center of American consciousness.
Perhaps more than anyone in the critical decades of the 1970s and 80s, Denneny helped to build a gay literary and intellectual “world” against a homophobic mainstream amid the catastrophe of the AIDS crisis. He was inspired throughout by his interpretation of Arendt’s philosophical writings alongside her earlier activism in Jewish relief organizations amid the disasters of the 1930s and 40s. His vision—so crucial to the creation of modern gay identity in the United States—owed much to her unique understanding of Zionism as a struggle to build a new “world” for modern Jewish life in its diversity. He read her later theoretical work through the prism of her earlier political engagement and translated both for the needs of American gay men.
Like Arendt, Denneny came to argue that the best hope for the survival of human freedom lay not in traditional ideas of abstract, universal human rights enshrined in texts and protected by official institutions (that is, in the historical mode of political liberalism), but rather in specific minority communities devoted to creating new practices, pleasures and identities, in a spirit of political engagement that could serve as a model for other groups. In that sense, gay liberation—as an exemplary model of collective freedom to forge new ways of being together—mattered deeply to straight people. And, in a vital lesson for our current moment, when defenders of “diversity” and advocates for the free exchange of opinion so often seem to be locked in opposition as our liberal democracy implodes, Denneny echoed Arendt in urging us to see diversity and debate as inseparable elements of the “world,” equally vital to the free expression of our identities and to preservation of our collective political life.
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Arendt argued throughout her work, although with critically shifting emphases, that the possibility of political freedom for society as whole depends on particular groups within it being able to constitute distinct “worlds” in which their members can exchange perspectives, debate their common interests, and face the wider “world” composed of other groups. That is, a healthy society is diverse in the sense of being made up of individual units like economic classes and religious and ethnic minorities (represented by associations, trade unions, churches etc.), which are themselves characterized by internal diversity and lively debate.
Diversity and debate prevent, in a logic familiar from Montesquieu and Madison, the emergence of a single all-powerful leader or stifling consensus. In such accounts, which form the basis for American political common sense today, we imagine minorities as homogenous interest groups, which, in the play of their rival ambitions, keep each other in check, through a kind of balance of power akin to that at work in international relations. Politicized minorities, each pursuing its collective interests, can, if their debates and rivalries are properly channeled, be a force for good in politics.
Arendt’s argument is substantively different. In her account, minorities are important not insofar as they are internally unified groups engaged in the play of countervailing interests and powers, but rather insofar as they are internally heterogeneous groups whose very diversity offers a sort of school in which citizens learn how to have judgment: the capacity to express and exchange ideas without appeal to fixed rules. Differences within “our own groups”—our everyday experiences of debates with other people “like us” in the spaces of our associational life (synagogues, union halls, gay bars, etc.) prepare us for the still more challenging experiences of disagreement in our wider political life, where we cannot necessarily trust that our interlocutors share our identities, experiences, and goals.
Indeed, the experience of uncertainty is constitutive of politics, as Arendt saw it. Politics is one of a number of domains, she argued, in which we cannot call upon, in the course of our mutual questioning about what is to be done, anything like a logical principle (2+2=4) that all rational beings might recognize or a universally agreed-upon norm that all, or nearly all, members of our community do recognize. In these domains we are obligated to, as she often says, “woo” each other, to practice the arts of rhetorical seduction—which does not mean in her account, that we are in debates over politics merely practicing sophistry.
Rather, we are—as we find ourselves constantly doing in our most quotidian, non-political conversations—appealing to each other to share perspectives (Look!, we say, don’t you see?), on the assumption that each of us is positioned differently, because of our experiences, knowledge, interests, etc., in relation to a field of objects to which we all refer. We assume, in other words, that our divergent perspectives are perspectives on something, on the same things, and that we can by discussing them, inviting our interlocutors into our position by rendering it in speech, and projecting ourselves through our imaginations into their own positions, come closer to a true picture of the situation.
A “world” in Arendt’s special terminology is such a circuit of shared objects, perspectives, and discourses on them. “Judgment” is her name for the capacity that is enacted in and sustained by a “world.” Arendt is often noted for her theorization of thinking, which she characterized as a solitary activity that removes us, mentally, from our everyday shared life with others, and exposes us to being unsettled out of our former certainties. Thinking is, as she famously put it, “without a banister,” posing the risk of a dangerous fall.
But in situations that call for judgment we turn from this essentially private intellectual adventure back towards other people, whom we wish to convince about something we have thought—and, often, convince to do something we have envisioned through thinking. Judgment, like thinking, has no “banister.” There are no pre-determined norms that we can appeal to when we want to convince other people that our perspective or plan is a good one. Judgment does, however, take place in a world, which in Arendt’s particular definition names a set of interlocutors with different outlooks on common things.
Thus while for us today it is common to speak of, for example, a gay or LGBTQ (or Jewish, Black, etc.) community—as if this named a set of people living in the same place, or defined by common values and norms—we might more usefully speak of a gay world as the set of sites and practices by which gay men speak to (that is, disagree with, and try to convince) each other about phenomena that appear to them. What holds together such a world is not agreement about values, or even consensus about the criteria by which members ought to be identified, but the shared desire to exchange perspectives, underwritten by the shared belief that these perspectives, as perspectives on something perceived in common, can be somehow reconciled through the triangulations of judgment.
These two terms, world, and judgment, which as I’ve suggested above we could also call diversity and debate, are inseparable, and have both a social and psychological dimension. They are linked, above all, to the fate of minorities characterized by the possession of common, objective characteristics and by the exchange of views; society’s capacity to resist totalitarianism and totalizing ideologies, Arendt claims again and again throughout her work, depends on the strength and internal diversity of its minorities, on their having simultaneously a solid material-institutional basis and a robust capacity for multi-perspectival debate.
In her first systematic treatment of the topic, the final volume of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Arendt warned that the trajectory of modern social, economic, and political trends since the 19th Century has been to undermine the existence of particular, internally diverse but nevertheless coherent social groups, leading to a “classless” society of “masses.” Members of the latter are not, Arendt stresses, free-thinking individuals liberated from the oppressive, limiting constraints of “identity” or group membership. Rather, they suffer from a “characteristic lack of discerning judgment” because they have no training—which membership in concrete groups and their spaces of dialogue would provide—in exchanging perspectives through the persuasive exercise of reason.
This, she warned, is what makes modern conditions inherently “pretotalitarian.” Individuals within the new “masses,” confused, disoriented, and lacking any sense of participation in a shared “world” (and thus of trust in their ability to intelligently coordinate their own perspectives with those of other people), desperately seek relief from their condition in the unworldly, holistic, homogeneous vision provided by ideologies and the totalitarian movements that promote them. The collapse of stable minority identities does not free individuals but prepares them for the most unfree systems of thought and politics.
Totalitarianism offers a horrible “solution” to the problem of modern life, in which individuals lack access to genuine, concrete, internally variegated groups whereby meaningful, resolvable disagreements are possible because they are secured through reference to common experiences. (We disagree, for example, about “what is good for the Jews?” and perhaps “who is a Jew?” but agree that there are Jews and there is something good for them, and that our varying responses are responses to the same questions and meant to be exchanged in order to come to an answer.) Atomized, “massified” individuals lack the intellectual resources to resist the lure of totalizing ideologies, which promise them membership in abstract, fantastical, unified groups—like the Aryan race—within which diversity and debate is not possible (the unity of any group, indeed, exists at the level of abstraction and fantasy—what characterizes real groups is their variation, diversity, and continual wrangling). Minorities are a bulwark against pretotalitarian mass society. But how can the existence of minorities (of real, concrete groups characterized by debate, not illusory groups for the sake of which regimes exercise total social control) be preserved?
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In Origins of Totalitarianism Arendt briefly suggests that appeals to individual conscience or common senses--to the traditional liberal notions of human rights designed to protect individuals, or to pluralism and freedom of opinion--will have little value as protections against totalitarianism and ideology in conditions where the psychological and social conditions for the proper forms of group membership are lacking. We need, more than appeals to such principles, to reconstruct “worlds” for minorities, conceived as internally diverse, and indeed as something like “preschools” for politics, in which individuals learn how to exchange perspectives, tolerate disagreement, and attempt to secure temporary consensus on particular ideas and projects through the use of judgment and its associated rhetorical strategies.
What would this look like? Arendt gives one brief—and perhaps troubling suggestion—in her discussion of the difference she finds between the policies of Lenin and those of Stalin in the early decades of the Soviet Union. While Stalin, she argues, was a true totalitarian politician, attacking class and ethnic groups perceived as “objective enemies” with deportations, famines, and collective murder, Lenin, when he came to power after the October Revolution, recognized with “his great instincts for statesmanship rather than his Marxist convictions” that after the collapse of the Czarist regime organized around the monarch and Orthodox Church, the new Bolshevik state was confronted by “anarchic social conditions… which favored sudden changes.” He attempted—at least so Arendt saw it—to restore order to Russian society, to arrest this pretotalitarian collapse of Russia’s “worlds,” by strengthening “independent trade unions… a new middle class… by organizing, and sometimes inventing, as many nationalities as possible.”
His economic and nationality policies, in other words, were entirely unlike Stalin’s, insofar as they aimed to end the social conditions that give rise to totalitarian movements. Although Lenin hardly sought to promote debate and the exercise of political judgment, he recognized that without diverse, concrete, internally varied social interest groups, Russian society would remain dangerously unstable, full of restless individuals unable to rationally coordinate themselves or to resist impulses to wild political shifts.
Arendt’s view of Lenin may well have been inaccurate, or overly motivated by her own philosophical concerns (this too is a point for another essay). But her comments on his policies mark an early attempt to address what, given what she saw as the pretotalitarian conditions of modernity, might be done to shore up the social prerequisites for the exercise of judgment by promoting what we might call “the right kind” of minority groups.
Lenin’s approach, obviously, was top-down and, in the sense of seeking to impose order out of chaos, could be called conservative. But what Arendt saw as his non-ideological instincts for statesmanship had gotten hold of the invaluable truth that getting out of the slough of massified, pretotalitarian social conditions requires the restoration of a genuine diversity of groups in society, defined less by their long prior history than by objective common features such as economic condition and shared language—features which, Arendt might add, make it possible for such groups not only to oppose sudden changes but also to foster debate (on the basis that internal differences of opinion reflect different perspectives on a shared condition).
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In her subsequent work Arendt would continue to consider how minorities play a crucial role in resisting totalitarian ideologies and pretotalitarian social conditions, without ever wholly endorsing any particular solution. In the early 60s, in an essay, “The Crisis in Culture,” which Denneny argued was the heart of her work, she suggested that the “world” could be recovered not by states promoting minorities through policies of social engineering, but by members of these groups risking the public expression of their “taste,” that is, of their distinct modes of shared appreciations, above all for physical beauty. This might seem an even stranger argument than her claim that Lenin was, at least unconsciously, resisting totalitarianism! If the former may sound Machiavellian (and indeed Machiavelli, in his Discourses on Livy, attributed the “virtue” of the Roman Republic to its particular form of constructive tension among social classes), the latter may sound simply decadent, a sort of empty aesthetic pseudo-solution to dire political and social problems.
But, as is true of a number of scholars, such as D.N. Rodowick, Martin Blumenthal Barby, and Linda Zerrilli, Arendt’s ideas about judgment in politics were, in her later work, inseparable from her thinking about how we exchange our perspectives on what’s beautiful or ugly in the aesthetic domain. Taking culture and judgments of taste about cultural artifacts seriously, from this perspective, may allow us to better understand what is at stake when we talk about politics together—and the future of our liberal democracy depends precisely on such talk. If we cannot, through it, share both important truths and our diverse perspectives, both secure agreement about matters of common concern and tolerate inevitable disagreement, then our regime cannot endure.
We must preserve that distinct (and for Arendt crucially political) domain in which we can tell other people about how we see the world and what we value in it, and appeal to each other about how to enlarge or correct our perspectives in order to undertake new kinds of action together. The capacity for doing so is, she suggested, specially linked with discovering oneself as the member of a minority defined by its own peculiar mode of appreciating beauty. She observed that“to classify taste… among man’s political abilities sounds so strange that I may add another more familiar but theoretically little regarded fact… we all know very well how quickly people recognize each other, when they discover a kinship in questions of what pleases… taste decides not only how the world is to look, but also who belongs together in it.” She concluded in her essay that “culture”—the deliberate cultivation of taste—means above all that each of us should know “how to choose his company,” how to become the right kind of minority.
In other words, what may seem the least political matters of quotidian conversation about what sort of books or clothes we like, and why we like them, are related, in crucial ways, to the larger political “conversations” that sustain our democracy. The former is as a sort of education for the latter, by which individuals discover themselves to be members of a group that is at once "objective” (defined by real, concrete shared features—we do in fact like the same things, we discover perhaps indeed to our surprise), but also “constructed” (assembled through the very fact of our talking together), held by something in common but also marked by different perspectives on it, which enrich and expand each other by being shared. Finding out through our aesthetic talk that we form a group—an internally diverse minority—helps us understand how political talk can be something other than the fatal illusions of ideology or the deadening conformity of cliché.
Denneny’s PhD dissertation under Arendt, which he wrote in the late 1960s and early 70s, concerned precisely the connections between aesthetic and political taste, as his advisor continued to develop the idea that aesthetic judgment, as theorized by Kant, was vitally relevant to our modern political situation.
As Denneny described it in a letter to Arendt in 1971, the idea of taste concerns not just how we form aesthetic preferences, but also how we talk with other people about them in the absence of fixed, certain rules or canons of value. When we disagree with other people over matters of taste (asking questions of each other like, “Is this a good movie? Is this a beautiful man?”), we are, on the one hand, unwilling to simply declare our liking and disliking to be purely subjective and thus without meaning for others. But we are also unable to point to some universally agreed-upon standard. Thus, we are in a tricky kind of middle position, appealing to each through rhetoric strategies that Kant, as Arendt reminded Denneny, called “wooing,” with deliberate resonances of romantic-erotic seduction.
Taste, Denneny wrote to Arendt, is what we need in situations where neither pure whim nor logical rules can operate, and, more generally, in our modern “world-situation… taste is the new faculty that allows one to orient himself without fixed points of support in a world where traditional modes of valuation have collapsed and one is confronted constantly with movement, novelty, and the possibility of deception and the necessity of choice.” A few months later, after he abandoned his dissertation to move to New York and pursue a career in publishing, Denneny wrote to Arendt, quoting from this earlier letter:“I shall get a dose of my own thesis and ‘learn to orient myself in the world without fixed points of support.’” The description, of course, fit not only his position of being nearly 30 and jobless in a new city, or the general predicament of our modern era, with its characteristic decline of traditional values, but also the characteristic problem of a gay man discovering himself.
After Arendt’s death four years later, Denneny arranged for the publishing house that by then had hired him, St. Martin’s Press (which was by then also, under his direction, publishing an innovative line of mainstream gay fiction), to publish The Recovery of the Public World, a volume of essays by scholars dedicated to what he took to be the major theme of his mentor’s work. He emphasized the role of taste, or what Arendt more often called “judgment,” the exchange of ideas about aesthetic, ethical, and political values, in making a “world,” a community grounded in both objective reality and our debates about our different perspectives on it.
Denneny’s contribution, “The Privilege of Ourselves: Hannah Arendt on Judgment,” his only academic publication, is frequently cited by scholars of Arendt for the invaluable light it throws on her late work. But it could also be read in term of Denneny’s dissertation (and its own influence on Arendt’s final, posthumously published work), and of his decision in the mid-70s to “out” himself as a gay publisher. Indeed, these texts can be interpreted as a way of theorizing the purpose and stakes of the new form of gay cultural politics Denneny was helping to invent.
By founding (along with Charles Ortleb and Edmund White) Christopher Street in 1976, the first truly mainstream magazine for gay men, Denneny created a space where gay men could speak to each other about a range of concerns—from literature to politics to sexuality—in a publication aimed at reproducing the intellectually sophisticated tenor of that era’s The New Yorker for a specifically gay male audience. Its role in promoting writers like Andrew Holleran and George Stambolian, whose work laid the foundation for gay literature in the modern sense, can hardly be overstated—nor can its role in solidifying the aesthetic and habitus of urban gay men of that era.
While other gay magazines featuring fiction, serious essays, and what we might call “lifestyle pieces” existed, like the slightly earlier San Francisco-based Vector, Christopher Street soon became the most widely circulating and highest-profile among them. Notably, unlike many other North American gay publications such as The Gay Alternative and Fag Rag, Christopher Street was, although hardly apolitical, not programmatically aligned with socialism or feminism. Rather it represented a commitment to nurture a gay public sphere in which ideas could be exchanged among gay men of different viewpoints.
Understood in this context, the title of Denneny’s volume in tribute to Arendt—The Recovery of the Public World—is revelatory. A “public world,” the discursive possibility of speaking to a multitude of other people about what each of us perceive, understand, and take to matter for us—about matters of taste or judgment in the most extended sense—was first of all invaluable, and second, endangered. In the apparently triumphant post-war liberal democracies, Arendt—and Denneny echoing her—warned that conditions for the true exchange of perspectives were increasingly insecure, eroded by the rise of mass media, social atomization, and stifling pressures for conformity.
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There are, of course, grounds for being skeptical about the relationship sketched above between, on the one hand, aesthetics, taste, culture, identity, etc., and, on the other, political life, particularly in our current media environment. In my first engagement with Arendt’s ideas about judgment, in a 2020 essay for Tablet, I argued that a close reading of one of her more obscure book reviews (on Nathalie Sarraute’s novels The Golden Fruits) revealed that Arendt herself at times doubted whether it was possible, given the power of mass media and the culture industry, for there to still be such a thing as judgment rather than the mere circulation of cliches:
“They’ are all alike,” Arendt said of Sarraute’s characters, because, yearning for human connection, they try to use their superficially insightful twists on the ruling opinion as 'passwords and talismans’ that grant them entry into some select club of ‘those who belong together.’ They cannot share personal experiences of the book with others, because their experiences have been impersonal from the outset, warped by their anxious desire to generate statements about it that will signal both their loyalty to the fashion of the moment and their individual brilliance. A ubiquitous and totalizing media conversation has made it impossible to speak one’s mind because no one thus exposed to the din of so many voices and anxious to join them, can have a mind of their own to speak.”
I suggested at the essay’s conclusion that if she was this pessimistic half a century ago, then there is perhaps even more reason to be pessimistic today, when the media is no longer mass but so fragmented, polarized, and personalized that we seem to lack the very possibility of a shared world—even as we have an unprecedented ability to join groups of apparently like-minded individuals on social media to create informational and ideological “bubbles.”
Arendt’s own thinking about the relationship between cultural minorities and politics was never settled, ranging from despair to hope, the example of Lenin to that of taste-making aesthetes. Putting her thinking into practice, thus, cannot mean simply recapitulating Denneny’s strategies, or Arendt’s own work as either a Zionist activist or a public intellectual. We will have to rethink the possibilities of world-making, the connections between aesthetics and politics, the place of minorities in our democracy and of diverse viewpoints within minorities, in light of the many changes since their era—not least in the domains of media and technology. It might seem that, because of changes in these areas, we are already too much divided into separate worlds, based on affinities of belief and “identity,” and that we need something like a return to the rational public sphere of an earlier age.
But, by way of a conclusion, or as a spur to further thinking, I want to take a kind of ironic comfort from Arendt’s moment of pessimism. If, as she argued, there is a danger that we may, in the very exchange of perspectives, be speaking not at all to each other, that is, to specific interlocutors whose perspectives—and ultimately whose agreement—we desire (and thus whose disagreement we must tolerate), but rather to an abstract universal media pseudo-conversation, to the empty signifier of an invisible authority, one must admit that this peril characterizes our idle chatter on Twitter no less than the talk at cocktail parties and banal book reviews Arendt lamented in her day. In that sense it is not necessarily such a disaster if, for the moment, the possibility of a “national conversation” in media and politics seems to be suspended. Indeed, the whole point of Arendt and Denneny’s insight is to remind us that if we are to learn again how to speak to each other (and not merely speak in each other’s—perhaps merely virtual—presence), then participation in the life of real, concrete, internally diverse groups will be our classrooms.
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this is so brilliant!!!!