Arendt, Preference, and the Revolutionary Spectator

Taking on the problem of how to theorize freedom as a form of negativity in Negative Dialectics, Theodor Adorno claims that the denunciation of interpretation and the elevation of praxis arises from a “summary judgment [summarische Urteil]” about change. Negative Dialectics argues for the importance of critical thought or judgment, as Adorno gestures to above, “after changing the world failed [nachdem die Veränderung der Welt misslang],” and this is maintained in the work of contemporary theorists who do not want to make the same mistakes (theoretically or practically) about turning too quickly toward action. As Marx also did, contemporary thinkers of revolution craft a space for reflection or contemplation as a condition of praxis, but the tendency of theories of change is to convert the tension between the voluntaristic (or contemplative) subject and an involuntary negativity into a form of action. Describing this ambivalence between being able to intervene in the capitalist system and being an effect of the system in The Persistence of the Negative, Benjamin Noys takes up the term “agency” instead of “subject,” because he wishes to conceptualize the “disruption of the value-form” as “a practice” (18–19). The theorization of “disruption” as a form of resistance characterizes this stress on “practice” in contemporary theories of revolutionary transition, and this stress can be found both in theories of the potential for a transformation of necessity into freedom and in theories that imagine a negative “wresting” of freedom from necessity. In these projects of thinking revolution, what I find most interesting—and pernicious—is that the figure of a “necessary disruption” as the eclipse of contemplation, and as the resolution of the ambivalence between the voluntarism/involuntarism of the subject into a form of action, inevitably, although often inadvertently, ends up functioning as a principle of revolutionary practice. What is problematic about post-Marxist theories of revolutionary action is that there is not an account of what is lost in the eclipse of contemplation, in the conversion of the voluntaristic subject into involuntary negativity, because contemplation is consigned to the margins of political and revolutionary theory.¹

Although taking account of what is lost once the action begins might not present itself as a revolutionary question, in this essay I propose that more often than not, passing over moments of spectation and contemplation reflects gendered assumptions about the priority of practice. While I do not mean to imply that spectation and contemplation are themselves gendered, the dismissal of these forms of activity takes the form of the dismissal of female labor and women’s work as productive work, which was criticized by feminist Marxists beginning in the 1970s. Such a dismissal functions by relegating these forms of activity not just to the private realm but to particular forms of depoliticized life that become equated, through the idea of preference as personal choice, with liberal and neoliberal dispositions and with a deliberation about “means” rather than about “ends.” In thinking about how these forms of contemplation are dismissed, then, I argue that contemporary thinking about revolution loses sight of how the distinction between revolutionary and nonrevolutionary practice, which seems to emerge prescriptively at the end (as a form of deferred action and freedom), is also posited as its necessary condition (the “necessary disruption”). In this essay, I attempt to excavate forms of contemplation and spectatorship and to think about moments in which a distinction between the revolutionary and nonrevolutionary subject becomes difficult to maintain, as is pointed out, for example, by Silvia Federici when she asks how you struggle “without destroying the people you care for” (7). Within this framework, I theorize the Arendtian notion of “preference,” which Arendt introduces through the Aristotelian notion of proairesis (literally pro-airesis, “a choice before choice”), to describe preference as a “proto-will” involving the ambiguity and mediation of freedom and necessity as a mode of approbation/disapprobation that leads to identification with others. Unlike Adorno, who found the eclipse of contemplation to mean the defeat of reason, Arendt is intent on recovering the capacity to act, but she also must think about how acting itself implies surrendering...