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(Multi-)Stabilities in the Public Sphere: Why Arendt Needs Postphenomenology

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Abstract

Since the 1990s, political theorists studied the impact of digital media on the public sphere. These debates extensively employ Arendt’s theory of the public sphere to evaluate whether social media meets the expectations and criteria set forth in her account. This common approach rests on a methodological assumption that is itself not critically examined: it asserts that one should start with a clear understanding of what political action ‘truly’ is and only then attend to its potential relation with technology. However, this article identifies two issues with this approach: it overlooks the complex interplay between technology and political action, and struggles to adapt Arendt’s pre-digital era theory to digital environments. Nonetheless, I argue that Arendt’s phenomenological methodology (i.e., how she develops her political theory) does offer an effective starting point to explore the changing relationship between politics and technology in the contemporary public sphere. This approach begins with an exploration of the technological conditions shaping political action rather than with a pre-established notion of political action. I demonstrate how this methodological blueprint can be expanded with a postphenomenological framework to bring Arendt’s political theory into the digital age, revealing how digital technologies continuously re-stabilize the intentional structure of political action.

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Notes

  1. In doing so, I follow a particular reading of Arendt as a phenomenologist in line with Borren (2010), Topolski (2015), and Loidolt (2018), and against those who identify her methodology as ‘fragmentary historiography’ (Althaus, 2000: 78) a ‘political sociology of the public sphere’ (Benhabib, 2003: 69).

  2. It must be noted that the topic of ‘technology’ (understood as artefacts) appears in at least two contexts in Arendt’s work: one concerns the role of modern science and technology in her critique of modernity (elaborated in Part VI of The Human Condition; cf. Undurraga, 2019), and another one relates to her phenomenological re-interpretation of ‘world’. Arendt sometimes consciously conflates these two approaches for normative reasons (Topolski, 2015: 12; Loidolt, 2018: 116). In the following, I will discuss Arendt’s modernity critique only marginally in order to allow a focused engagement with her phenomenological approach, as this is still unearthed territory in debates on social media and the public sphere.

  3. Arendt writes elsewhere in The Human Condition that ‘[w]hat makes mass society so difficult to bear is not the number of people involved, or at least not primarily, but the fact that the world between them has lost its power to gather them together, to relate and to separate them’ (Arendt, 2018: 52–53). In the fourth section, I will show how algorithmic media change the structure of this ‘in-between,’ and how they gather, relate, and separate people in social media environments.

  4. It must be noted here that this is not necessarily a ‘positive’ development. Arendt expresses, in her critique of modernity, indeed strong concerns with the advent of modern technology, especially automation. In this article, I am leaving the normative question of whether any technological development is in itself ‘good’ or ‘bad’ aside, simply to show, with Arendt, that technological conditions co-shape the environment in which political action unfolds.

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The research conducted for this article was funded by the Research Foundation– Flanders (FWO). Grant number: 1119522 

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    Anthony Longo

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Longo, A. (Multi-)Stabilities in the Public Sphere: Why Arendt Needs Postphenomenology. Hum Stud (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-024-09716-7

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