Theory as performative pedagogy: Three masks of hannah arendt

Educational Theory

Volumn 51, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 127-150

  Schutz, Aaron ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MILWAUKEE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0013087188     PISSN: 00132004     EISSN: 17415446     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-5446.2001.00127.x     Document Type: Article

References (107)

1. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 105. This book will be referred to as HC with page numbers in the text for all subsequent citations.
2. Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark, "Rediscovering Hannah Arendt," In Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, ed. Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 125.
3. Maxine Greene, The Dialectic of Freedom (New York: Teachers College Press, 1988).
4. Mordechai Gordon, Preserving Our Common World: Essays on Hannah Arendt and Education (Boulder: Westview Press, in press).
5. The fact that Arendt subsequently solves the particular contradiction in Marx that she was examining at this point does not alter her respect for his more general stance. Thus, I disagree with Hannah Pitkin, in The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt's Conception of the Social (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, when she argues that Arendt "did not even consider the possibility that seems so clearly implicit in the passage: that the fundamental and flagrant contradictions are what make the authors great rather than second rate, for example, because the fundamental truths they teach us actually are contradictory."1998), 249
6. Scott and Clark, "Rediscovering Hannah Arendt," 199-200.
7. Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, 4.
8. Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Rcinterpretation of Her Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,) and Pitkin, Attack of the Blob.1992
9. Mark Reinhardt, The Art of Being Free (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), xi.
10. Hannah Arendt, "Sonning Prize Speech," Hannah Arendt Collection, Library of Congress, April 18, 1975, 12-14
11. In her On Revolution (London: Penguin Books, she discusses this idea of masks a bit differently.1963 106-7
12. Note: in the next three sections I have experimented with writing in a way reminiscent of Arendt's own often blunt, unapologetic style.
13. Arendt, "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship," The Listener, 6 (1964): 205.
14. Seyla Benhabib, "Hannah Arendt and the Redemptive Power of Narrative," Social Research, 57, no. 1 (1990): 184.
15. Hannah Arendt, "Personal Responsibility," 186-87.
16. Lisa Disch, "More Truth Than Fact," Political Theory 21, no. 4 (1993): 671.
17. Benhabib, "Narrative," 184.
18. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace javonovich, 1968), viii.
19. Arendt, "On Hannah Arendt," 337.
20. Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, (London:. This book will be referred to as BPF with page numbers in the text for all subsequent citations. Penguin, 1968), 51
21. Disch, "More Truth Than Fact," 669.
22. Benhabib, "Narrative," 184. However, Anne Norton argues in "Heart of Darkness: Africa and African Americans in the Writings of Hannah Arendt, in Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, ed. Bonnie Honig (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1995), 253, for example, that Arendt failed to give a "voice" to the Africans and African Americans discussed in her work, and did not, in fact, treat them as equals. Although she may have attempted this, she was not able to carry it off, or willing to engage in the "work" that might have allowed her to carry it off more effectively - see my concluding comments. See also Iris Young, Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy, and Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, for a discussion of broader problems with Arendt's effort.1997
23. Disch, "More Truth Than Fact," 669.
24. Benhabib, "Narrative," 182.
25. Benhabib, "Narrative," 182.
26. For a more detailed discussion of Arendt's vision of "public space," see Schutz, "Contesting Utopianism."
27. Arendt, The Human Condition, Especially chaps. 2 and 5.
28. Ronald Beiner, "Interpretive Essay," in Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press Who argues that Arendt shifted the activity of judgment over time from the political into the life of the mind. Here I make a more subtle distinction., 1982), 89-156,
29. Disch, "More Truth Than Fact," 687.
30. Arendt noted in "What Remains? The Language Remains": A Conversation with Günter Gaus," in Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company), 1, that "my profession, if one can even speak of it at all, is political theory."1994
31. Arendt, On Revolution, 220.
32. Hannah Arendt, "On Hannah Arendt," in Hannah Arendt and the Recovery of the Public World, ed. Melvyn Hill (New York: St Martin's Press, 1979), 329.
33. These different case studies are spread, for example, throughout Arendt, The Human Condition.
34. For a more detailed discussion of the tensions of the public, see Schutz, "Contesting Utopianism."
35. Arendt, On Revolution, 77.
36. Peter Stern and Jean Yarbrough, "Hannah Arendt," The American Scholar 47 (1978), 373.
37. Arendt, On Revolution, 220.
38. Arendt, Origins, viii.
39. The nature of society, Arendt argued, had shifted from "actual rank in the. half-feudal society of the eighteenth century, [to] title in the class society of the nineteenth,. [and to] mere function in the mass society of today" (HC, 41).
40. In this sense, Lessing became an actor that, through his actions, distorts (repairs?) the social into an odd state that is between a public space and "society."
41. Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt Brace Javonovich, 1968), 30 and 29.
42. As Canovan notes, in Hannah Arendt, however, Arendt was actually surprisingly consistent in her presentation of her ideas.
43. Hannah Arendt, "A Reply,"Review of Politics 15 (1953): 78
44. Disch, "More Truth Than Fact" 679.
45. Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace Javonovich, 1972), 228.
46. Arendt, On Revolution, 173, italics mine.
47. Again, Schutz, "Contesting Utopianism," For a discussion of the precariousness of Arendtian public spaces.
48. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 7-8.
49. Arendt, "On Hannah Arendt," 310
50. This is very different than her vision of education for children, where she argued the teacher does need to hold "authority" over her students. See BPF, chap. 6, and Aaron Schutz, "Is Political Education an Oxymoron? Hannah Arendt's Resistance to Public Spaces in Schools,"Philosophy of Education (Urbana: Philosophy of Education Society, in press).2001
51. Arendt, "On Hannah Arendt," 309
52. She is also referring, here, to her own particular understanding of the process of "thinking" that was fundamentally different from public action. See Hannah Arendt, "Thinking," in Hannah Arendt, Life of the Mind (New York; Harcourt Brace Javonovich, 1978).
53. Hannah Arendt, "'What Remains? The Language Remains'" 15-16
54. There is a lot of confusion about why Arendt wrote about the Jewish Councils in this way, nicely discussed by Pitkin in Attack of the Blob, for example. I tend to interpret Arendt as attempting, in part, to give back some limited agency to the Jews, so they will be interpreted less as victims. While she noted later in "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship," 205, that "impotence, complete powerlessness, is. a valid excuse" for not acting, she goes on to argue that it is sometimes still possible not to support oppression. As Pitkin and others note, however, her knowledge of the events around this issue was problematically limited. There is not space to adequately address Arendt's discomfort with efforts to publicly discuss the "personal," something she implicitly touches on in this statement. See her discussion, for example, in On Revolution, 97-98.
55. Hannah Arendt, "The Archimedian Point,"Ingenor (Spring, 1969)
56. BPF andCanovan, "Hannah Arendt," 96.277
57. Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For the Love of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 473.
58. Although, again, as Canovan points out in Hannah Arendt, 6. Arendt had a "naturally systematic mind," so these are more systematic than she might intellectually have wished.
59. She adds, here, "Without losing their identity."
60. She also notes that large numbers of people, themselves, make "behaviorism" more valid. I think what she means is when people treat themselves as members of a larger mass. I do not think she is trying to argue for a kind of determinism, but see Pitkin, in Attack of the Blob, who struggles with this issue.
61. Bronwyn Davies, "The Subject of Post-Structuralism: A Reply to Alison Jones," Gender and Education, 9, no. 3 DOI: 10.1080/09540259721259 (1997): 271-284.
62. Nicholas C. Burbules's vision of postmodernism, in "Postmodern Doubt and Philosophy of Education," in Philosophy of Education 1995
63. Alven Neiman (Urbana: Philosophy of Education Society, 1996), Arendt's vision looks very postmodern, something I have argued differently elsewhere. See, Aaron Schutz, "Teaching Freedom? Postmodern Perspectives,"Review of Educational Research 70, no. 2 (2000): 215-51.
64. Maxine Greene, "Epistemology and Educational Research: The Influence of Recent Approaches to Knowledge," Review of Research in Education, 19 (1994): 439.
65. Greene, "Epistemology," 458.
66. Vera John-Steiner, Robert J. Weber, and Michele Minnis, Cited in Caroline Clark, no. 4 Roberta J. Herter, and Pamela A. Moss, "Continuing the Dialogue on Collaboration," American Educational Research Journal. 35, (1998): 738.
67. Caroline Clark, et. al., "Collaboration as Dialogue: Teachers and Researchers Engaged in Conversation and Professional Development" American Educational Research Journal, 33, no. 1 (1996): 202
68. Cited in Clark, Herter, and Moss, "Continuing the Dialogue on Collaboration" 789.
69. Kaiping Peng and Richard E. Nesbitt, "Culture, Dialectics, and Reasoning About Contradiction," American Psychologist, 54, no. 9 DOI: 10.1037//0003-066X.54.9.741 (1999): 741.
70. Joan Wailach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996)
71. Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands: The NewMestiza=La Frontera (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987
72. Patricia Hill Collins, "The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought," Signs, 14, no. 4 (1989): 745-73
73. Of course, this work questions the very idea of a stable conception of "American."
74. Arendt speaks of "philosophers," here, but I think was indicating a much larger field of thinkers. Because this essay was a response to the many criticisms that arose around her Eichmann book, it appears she is tangentially speaking of herself as well.
75. The second quotation is a citation from Jefferson. She actually says, here "an altogether different'field of imagination,'" however, what she is referring to is a kind of cognition that is not related to the world but instead is inherent in the very structures of our mind, an idea that I do not have space to examine.
76. As many Others have noted, she was indebted in this vision to her teacher, Martin Heidegger. See, for example, Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Thousand Oaks: SAGE), chap. 21996
77. Elizabeth Ellsworth and Janet L. Miller, "Working Difference in Education," Curriculum Inquiry 26, no. 3 (1996): 247.
78. Stern and Yarbrough, "Hannah Arendt," 374.
79. Nicholas C. Burbules, "Teaching and the Tragic Sense of Education," Teaching and Its Predicaments, ed. Nicholas C. Burbules and David T. Hansen (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997), 65.
80. Magdalene Lampert, "How Do Teachers Manage to Teach? Perspectives on Problems in Practice," Harvard Educational Review, 55, no. 2 (1985): 181
81. Lilian G. Katz and James Raths, "Six Dilemmas in Teacher Education," Journal of Teacher Education, 43, no. 5 (1992): 376-86.
82. Burbules, "Teaching and the Tragic Sense of Education," 66.
83. Lampert, "How do Teachers Manage to Teach?" 183.
84. Burbules, "Teaching and the Tragic Sense of Education" 71.
85. Clark, et. al., "Collaboration as Dialogue," 201
86. Patti Lather's work, especially, "Troubling Clarity: The Politics of Accessible Language," Harvard Educational Review, 66, no. 3 (1996): 525-45.
87. Patti Lather, "Troubling Clarity."
88. Joan Landes, "Novus Ordo Saeclorum: Gender and Public Space in Arendt's Revolutionary France" In Honig, Feminist Interpretations, 210.
89. Hannah Arendt, "The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition" In Hannah Arendt, The low as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, ed. R.H. Feldman (New York: Grove Press, 1978), 67-90.
90. Pitkin, In Attack of the Blob, 21, says that Arendt would "later abandon" the distinction between the pariah and the parveneu that was central to her discussion of the kind of social positioning Jews were subjected to. What I think Pitkin really means is that it was transformed, and that the idea of the "pariah" remained important to her. See also
91. Jennifer Ring, "The Pariah as Hero," Political Theory, 19, no. 3 (1991): 433-53.
92. Lisa Disch, "On Friendship in 'Dark Times'" Honig Feminist Interpretation, 305, phrase in brackets from Disch's preceding sentence.
93. Pitkin, Blob, 36
94. Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For the Love of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982)
95. Hannah Arendt, "Reflections on Little Rock" Dissent 6 (1959): 45-55
96. Jean Elshtain's discussion in "Political Children" in Honig, Feminist Interpretations, 263-83
97. Anne Norton, "Heart of Darkness: Africa and African Americans in the Writings of Hannah Arendt" In Honig, Feminist Interpretations, takes this farther, arguing that Arendt often refused to treat Africans and African Americans as active agents.
98. Williams cited in Ellsworth and Miller, "Working Difference," 250.
99. Patricia Williams, Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 8.
100. Cited in Ellsworth and Miller, "Working Difference" 246.
101. Anne Ruggles Gere, "Kitchen Tables and Rented Rooms: The Extracurriculum of Composition" College Composition and Communication, 57, no. 6 (1994): 75-92
102. who examines the limitations of the metaphor of the "kitchen table" of dialogue for different groups.
103. Schutz, "Creating Local 'Public Spaces' in Schools."
104. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993),
105. Susan Bordo, "Feminism, Postmodernism, and Gender-Skepticism" in Feminism/Postmodemism, ed. Linda J. Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1990), 133-56
106. I explore aspects of this idea in Schutz, "Teaching Freedom?"
107. Arendt, Origins, viii.