Arendt, The Human Condition Chapter 3 "Labor" Sections 13, 14, 17

 Arendt, The Human Condition Chapter 3 “Labor” Sections 13, 14, 17

Questions:

1. Pg 132: Connection between AI and “waste economy.” Where are all these aspects of life where automation (today) is rendering away tangibility in work?

2. How is history operating in the text, if at all? Locke, Smith, and Marx do understand civilization in relation to labor (and wealth). So, since Arendt underplays this relation here, how should we think about civilization in Arendt’s account?

3. Pg 127-128: When Arendt talks about playfulness/ hobbies. What do we make of this? 

4. What does Arendt mean by the world? E.g., p 97, “Without a world into which…” If the world is what brings people together, then should we understand it aside from just physicality or objects?

5. “Metabolic rift,” vis-a-vis labor and waste, what is this? (99)

6. P. 109: How do classical distinctions between productive/ unproductive and skilled/unskilled labor map onto her categorical distinctions? (i.e. labor, work, action)

7. What is Arendt doing with the zoe/ bios distinction?

Discussion

• We’re going to start with the labor/work distinction by way of a parlor game, i.e., going to see what sort of “activities” belong in each category. 

• Seems like a lot of things that come under “labor” are what would be particular to social reproduction, though Arendt doesn’t discuss gender in this text.

• At the level of civilization, we can see that who gets to be assigned different categories is gendered as well. 

• (99): regenerating life processes produce new labor power (c.p. Marx), and she discusses the repetitive aspect of laboring. Unlike working, where something is finished, it moves into the common world.

• Part of the argument seems to be that things that used to be work have fallen into the category of labor. Where, things that can be commodified have now made life’s reproductive activities and the cycles of regeneration. 

• So, some activities can mean different things, however, depending on their relation to capital. 

• There is a worry then about this work/labor distinction because it doesn’t seem to track the blurriness or the “how” that an activity is situated in relation to capital, especially given the gendering that isn’t being extricated. 

• Worry that there is an overcorrection of work at the expense of labor.

• Seems like she may have a naturalistic view of labor, which would be departing from late Marx, where the society determines.

• Could be following the early Marx

• Passage on 101: Hercules and the stables, is labor, or the danger of it, really just its monotony, its “relentless repetition?” 

• Ultimately, Arendt isn’t giving any delineation between the “activity” as subjectively versus objectively meaningful, but maybe that’s not the point. The point being that we are accustomed to seeing most things today as labor, whereas otherwise we could view some activities as work. 

• Transcendental condition of labor is actually work, that is, need or require work and its products to sustain birth and death. 

• Perhaps Arendt wants a normative conception of the subject of the vitae activa, and in articulating this distinction of activities, she is affirming a world wherein we all partake in each aspect of these: labor, work, action.

• That capitalism expropriates time, connected to Arendt’s account of “laborification” as pushing aside possibilities for time or temporality that overflows or disrupts chrononormativity and cyclical time.

• Maybe her concern isn’t that we aren’t all equal in inhabiting all three spaces, but that none of us are currently free to. Not so much that she’s worried about equality, but about freedom. 

• Okay so there is now another can of worms: What is Arendt’s conception of freedom? Freedom from labor?

• No, that’s impossible really, since labor is necessary for the human condition. 

• Going back to the automation question…something interesting about fertility and what it would mean to automate labor as a sphere.

• Parlor Game: is exercise labor or work?

• Also worth bringing up Benjamin’s worry about art and mechanical, mass reproduction. The problem isn’t so much that art is subsumed, but that perception is changed. Like a form of subjectivation. 

• Under what conditions does an action become labor, work, or action? The trichotomy maps conditions, not kinds of action.

Arendt, The Human Condition, Ch. 2 and 3

1. What is Arendt's distinction between private property and wealth?

2. How is Arendt understanding "privacy/privative"? 

3. How does Marx's distinction between productive and unproductive labor map on to Arendt's account of labor? Also, what is "labor-power" for Arendt? (pp. 87-89).

4. What kind of continuity or discontinuity do we get with Arendt's account of modernity? (e.g., the secularization of political concepts) (p. 64).

5. Dissolution of private space --> depth/hiddenness that is lost? What is the "darkness"? Is it normative? How do we square this with her method? (p. 71).

Private property not in the economic sense, but something more like "a space of one's own." Where one protects oneself from others. That's why Arendt is reluctant about the abolition of private property and maybe wants to disassociate the abolition of wealth (inequality?) with the abolition of private property (contra Marx?). 

Why does Arendt equivocate private property with hiddenness? In other words, why "hidden" and not something like "unavailable" or "un-regardable"? In the public realm, you're in this space of constant accountability; the private sphere is the way to hide away from that -- something which the public cannot penetrate. e.g., even slaves were not without property (pp. 61-62).

Private property was also tied to place, and place was identified with family (p. 61). Also tied to citizenship, if you were relinquished of your property then you'd be relinquished of your citizenship. Slaves still held "personal or private possessions" even if they did not private property in the sense of a place of their own. The working class is the craftsmen; the laboring class was the slave.

The point is that modernity/Marxism conflates property and wealth. There's also sacredness associated with private property, wealth was never concerned sacred in antiquity. It was considered bad to entirely expend one's private property in pursuit of wealth because you're giving up political freedom. Private property as the means of political freedom; making slaves do the labor for you.

Have y'all read Benjamin Constant's essay on the distinction between ancient liberty and modern liberty? For the ancients, freedom is the ability to act and speak in public; for the modern, liberty is the right to do what I want in their privacy.

Hiddenness in the sense of retreat vs. hiddenness in the sense of hidden-away (e.g., slaves and women). Slaves and women as living "laborious life," laborious because devoted to bodily functions (e.g., production and reproduction) (pp. 72-73).

For example, people nowadays talk about their domicile/homes as an investment, rather than as a place of existential significance (where one dwells and lives one life). 

Marx, Smith, Locke (e.g.,) are unable to make a distinction between property and wealth; private property as the basis of wealth accumulation, rather than as a place of hiddenness. 

Arendt's idiosyncratic vocabulary can make it hard to track her critiques of other authors (e.g., Locke, Smith, Marx) who don't use those concepts in the same way(?).

Wtr Term Readings: Arendt's 'The Human Condition'

We will focus on Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition this term -- we will read selections from this book during weeks 1 through 6 and then in weeks 7 through 9 we will focus on comparing Arendt's and Foucault's historical methods.

Week 1	Ch. I (Introduction) §1 = 11 pages Ch. II (Public and Private) §§ 4-6 = 28 pages
Week 2	Ch. II (Public and Private) §§ 8-10 = 21 pages  + Ch. III (Labor) §11 = 14 pages
Week 3	No Meeting
Week 4	Ch. III (Labor) §§ 13, 14, 17 = 23 new pages
Week 5	Ch. IV (Work) §§ 18, 20, 21, 22 = 28 pages
Week 6	Ch. V (Action) §§ 24, 25, 29, 30 = 26 page
Week 7	Ch. V (Action) §§ 31, 32 = 16 pages  + Ch. VI (Modern Age) §§ 35, 36 = 20 pages
Week 8	Ch. VI (Modern Age) §§42-45 = 32 pages
Week 9	Arendt, essay on history and method from Between Past and Future tbd Foucault, essay on history and method tbd
Week 10	Tentative  Essay on Foucault and Arendt by tbd (See also this recent special issue of Journal of Philosophy of History:  https://brill.com/view/journals/jph/18/3/jph.18.issue-3.xml?srsltid=AfmBOooK18torb3hvUVfY0A4g9IlPr53_MBAvdgWtJ9vfQLrTYNz2icv)
Week Exam	Tentative