Fighting Without Hatred: Hannah Arednt's Agonistic Rhetoric

Citation
Roberts-Miller, Patricia. "Fighting Without Hatred: Hannah Arendt's Agonistic Rhetoric." JAC, vol. 22, no. 3, 2002, pp. 585-601.

Summary
"By rhetoric, Arendt means agonistic rhetoric, or what is sometimes called pro-con thinking - confrontational, combative, and adversarial. For some theorists of rhetoric, agonism is rhetoric (Walter Ong, James Kastely, Thomas Sloane, and, arguably, Kenneth Burke), but a more popular approach is to distinguish between adversarial and collaborative rhetoric, dismissing the former." (585)

-Popular and pedagogic mistrust of agonism, preference for collaboration, because it presents the debate model of a zero-sum game. Culturally and scholarly, we presume that argument is a bad thing and is not able to effect change.

Totalitarianism and the Competitive Space of Agonism
"[Arendt] makes what strikes me as the strongest argument, if not for agonism, then at least for replacing much of our dislike of conflict with a mistrust of consensus." (587)

"Arendt's main criticism of the current human condition is that the common world of deliberate and joint action is fragmented into solipsistic and unreflective behavior. [...] What Arendt so beautifully describes is that isolation and individualism are not corollaries, and may even be antithetical because obsession with one's own self and the particularities of one's life prevents one from engaging in conscious, deliberate, collective action. Individuality, unlike isolation, depends upon a collective with whom one argues in order to direct the common life." (587)

-Arendt links appearing in public with performance, an action which can win accolades and admiration - a competitive act; against Habermas' ratio-centric public sphere.

-"The competition is not ruthless; it does not imply a willingness to triumph at all costs. Instead, it involves something like having such a passion for ideas and politics that one is willing to take risks. One tries to argticulate the best argument, propose the best policy, design the best laws, make the best response. This is a risk in that one might lose advancing an argument means that one must be open to the criticisms others will make of it. The situation is agonistic not because the participants manufacture or seek conflict, but because conflict is a necessary consequence of difference. This attitude is reminiscent of Kenneth Burke, who did not try to find a language free of domination but who instead theorized a way that the very tendency toward hierarchy in language might be used against itself. Similarly, Arendt does not propose a public realm of neutral, rational beings who escape differences to live in the discourse of universals; she envisions one of different people who argue with passion, vehemence, and integrity." (589)

Thought and the Social
A primary purpose of The Human Condition "is to argue for the special nature of thought," which is what gets lost on Eichmann the banal and unthinking (590).

"Arendt's most powerful descriptions of the social (and the other concepts similar to it, such as her discussion of totalitarianism, imperialism, Eichmann, and parvenus) emphasize that these processes are not entirely out of our control but that they happen to us when, and because, we keep refusing to make active choices. We create the social through negligence. It is not the sort of force in a Sorcerer's Apprentice, which once let loose cannot be stopped; on teh contrary, it continues to exist because we structure our world to reward social behavior." (592)

-The social as the conventional - the doxa

"Good thinking requires that one hear the arguments of other people. [...] Thinking is, in this view, necessarily public discourse: critical thinking is possible 'only where the standpoints of all others are open to inspection.'" (593, quoting Arendt's Lectures 43).

-Listening matters, not just speaking as transmission or even as exchange

Arendt's Polemical Agonism
"Asymmetric rhetoric ['theories that "presuppose an active speaker and a passive audience"'] is not and cannot be agonistic. Persuasive agonism still values conflict, disagreement, and equality among interlocutors, but it has the goal of reaching agreement" (595).

Difference between persuasive and polemical agonism:

"In persuasive agonism, one plays down conflict and moves through reasons to try to persuade one's audience. In polemical agonism, however, one's intention is not necessarily to prove one's case, but to make public one's thought in order to test it. In this way, communicability serves the same function in philosophy that replicability serves in the sciences; it is how one tests the validity of one's thought. In persuasive agonism, success is achieved through persuasion; in polemical agonism, success may be marked through the quality of subuequent controversy." (595)

"It is useful to note that Arendt tends not to use the term 'universal,' opting more often for 'common,' by which she means both what is shared and what is ordinary, a usage that evades many of the problems associated with universalism while preserving its virtues." (596)

-Arendt does not want us to take on the sort of detached objective bystander perspective; instead, we are in the thick of deliberation

"In polemical agonism, there is a sense in which one's main goal is not to persuade one's readers; persuading one's readers, if this means that they fail to see errors and flaws in one's argument, might actually be a sort of of failure. It means that one wishes to put forward an argument that makes clear what one's stance is and why one holds it, but with the intention of provoking critique and counterargument."

-Looking for interlocutors, not acolytes; against strong theory

"Like other proponents of agonism, Arendt argues that rhetoric does not lead individuals or communities to ultimate Truth; it leads to decisions that will necessarily have to be reconsidered. Even Arendt, who tends to express a greater faith than many agonists in the ability of individuals to perceive truth, insists that self-deception is always a danger, so public discourse is necessary as a form of testing." (597)

"Arendt does something we would do well to consider thoughtfully: a fact-based but not positivist, communally grounded but not relativist, adversarial but not violent, independent but not expressivist rhetoric." (598)

If there is a pedagogy in Arendt, it might be close to something like what Lazere outlines in "Teaching the Political Conflicts: A Rhetorical Schema."