Gerber

 The philistine, for Arendt, is almost by definition an individual without culture, but he is at the same time positively defined as the man of society (positively not in a question of value, but as a positive characteristic). When Arendt speaks of society, she means something more specific than what we might associate with this word, like a community living together. While she does not give a clear definition of what she means by “society,” she does tell us where she sees its origins: in the courts of Louis XIV, and his effort to depoliticise his nobility so as to establish absolute rule (cf. CC 196). The “intrigues and cabals” that replaced the political activity of nobility is what Arendt sees as the origin of “society”: questions of status and one’s position in the hierarchical order (the nobility were fighting for the favour of the king instead of dealing with actual politics), one’s own private interests concerning wealth and importance, and, above all, competition. But it was only with the rise of the bourgeoisie that a dominant class started to define itself primarily by such ‘societal’ considerations, and it is in that sense that Arendt situates the origins of the philistine, at least in his modern form, in the capitalist society. The reason for this is that while nobility legitimised its power by birth, the bourgeoisie’s power was purely based on economic terms, it lied in its material wealth and ownership. It therefore had to draw the legitimacy of its rule from elsewhere, which led, according to Arendt, to a long process of the appropriation of culture by the ruling class. In “The Crisis in Culture,” Arendt describes a whole development in the relation of the philistine to culture, from pure disinterest, where the philistine, not having a flair for culture, sees it as purely superfluous, to an active interest in it, so that the lack of legitimacy of rule outside of mere violence is compensated by what has come to be called cultural capital.3

placeholder ‘Culture’ thus becomes something one acquires, something one can have more or less of, and more importantly something that is tied to one’s “value,” so that it can be used to legitimise rule over those who, purportedly, don’t have it. In that sense, it becomes a mark of social status, and social status, just like material wealth, is something an individual acquires for itself, something that it ‘owns’ just like it owns its factories and company stocks. The man of society is in that sense the representative of the modern age for Arendt, because as traditional forms of legitimising power faded away, the world of culture has become an extension of the market, marked by the quest for dominance and a functionalist way of seeing. This ‘ideal type’, as we’ll see, can be opposed to another one, namely the man of culture, who, as we can already guess, will untie culture from questions of power and distinctions of worth between individuals.  Let it be already said that, if we are to distinguish, following Arendt, two ideal types when it comes to fundamental outlooks on life, it is a distinction that, as often within her thought, is mainly heuristic, because it intends to render something visible that remains unnoticed in our daily life;4placeholder it intends to interrupt our normal order of looking at things, in which sense Arendt is very much indebted to a modernist tradition. In that sense, there is on the one hand the man of society, and on the other hand, the man of culture. These two ideal types distinguish themselves one from another by their fundamentally different way of looking at things, and at the world they inhabit; one might even call them two existential modes of being.

Considering the origins that Arendt traces society to, we can see how for her it becomes almost congruent with ‘economy’, so that the opposition society-culture in many ways mirrors her famous opposition economy-politics. The fundamental way of looking at things that characterises the man of society is one that expresses his primary representative’s – the bourgeois philistine’s – way of thinking. To put it as succinctly as possible, the man of society submits everything around him to the calculus of instrumental rationality, so that everything is defined by its use value. Arendt does not follow Marx’s valorisation of use value against exchange value; to her, the concept of “value” implies exchangeability, and in that sense the negation of the given object’s inherent uniqueness.5placeholder Thus, for Arendt, modernity is not as much characterised by the universal loss of values, as nostalgic critiques of modernity present it, but rather by the emergence of the concept of value itself that arises with modernity. “Values” imply right from the start their exchangeability on a marketplace, where they indicate a certain social status, so that it is no surprise that it leads to the “bargain sale of values,” as Nietzsche, whom she references here, formulated it (cf. CC 201). The ‘social’ is the area of values because it is from there that the capitalist class draws the legitimacy of its rule beyond mere material power and violence, but as values basically act the same as merchandise, the ‘social’ is just the continuation of the economical by other means. Whereas material wealth is acquired with the help of instrumental reason on a competitive market, social status is acquired with the help of, well, exactly the same thing in the same way, merely on seemingly ‘cultural’ grounds: education and use of upper-class vocabulary and intonation, connections and personal acquaintance with important cultural figures, private art collections, and so on, all to prove that the capitalist class is worthy of ruling. As what counts here is exchange, the man of society fails to perceive the unique, the individual, the “event”: as a thing is perceived in accordance with its value, it is immediately viewed as something that can be replaced with something else of equal or higher value.

But the use value also assigns a fixed temporal limit to an object; once it’s ‘used up’, it can be replaced with another object that will fulfil the same function. Such a functional view is devoid of care, quite the opposite, it subsumes the individual objects to their imposed function, which rather pushes towards their consumption (towards their being used-up6placeholder), as the production of use values is itself of an economic interest; indeed, the economy is nothing but the production of use and exchange values. That our current economic system is based on the universal replaceability of people and things alike (‘human resources’) is, for Arendt, connected to a fundamental way of looking at the world; one that only sees use values, that judges everything it encounters according to its utility and functionality. Instrumental rationality is a fundamental way of thinking, and it characterises, according to Arendt, modernity as such, which is a world that more and more defines itself entirely by the cycle of production, going from production to distribution to consumption and back to production, as described by Marx in the introduction to the Grundrisse.7placeholder The economy is a cyclical affair, because it needs to uphold a continuously functioning order, which, to function, needs to ‘use up’ as many resources as possible, because its productivity, the totality of its productive forces, is defined by the mere (re)production of use values that uphold the normal functioning of the order of things. The more use values a society produces, the ‘wealthier’ it is, but to produce more use values, it needs to consume more use values, in that sense: use up all its resources as quickly as possible. The acceleratory character of capitalism lies in this dynamic, where consumption and production stimulate each other mutually. At its limit, the creation of use values is indistinguishable from the process of using-up; as Marx says it himself, once you take a closer look, you can’t really say if it’s production or consumption that comes first. It is such processuality, where things don’t really have a specific beginning nor a specific end, and which engulfs living and non-living ‘resources’ alike, that is the most fundamental characteristic of modernity for Hannah Arendt.

Timofei Gerber