On Obama's Nobel Peace Prize

I think a lot of the commentary on Obama's peace prize is well off the mark. The major theme, from the left and the right, from the major pundits and my facebook friends, is that Obama hasn't done enough to deserve this prize. After all, Obama has only been President for a few months, still presides over two wars, one of which is escalating, and, while he has made some gestures towards international diplomacy on several fronts, the critics left and right are fond of saying that he has only given a few good speeches, and hasn't actually done much.

I think this is analysis is wrong-headed for two reasons. First, the Nobel Peace Prize is as much about encouraging and supporting agents of peaceful change as it is about recognizing already accomplished deeds. Several commentators have quoted the statement of former Nobel Committee chair Francis Sejersted:

The prize [...] is not only for past achievement. [...] The committee also takes the possible positive effects of its choices into account [because] Nobel wanted the prize to have political effects. Awarding a peace prize is, to put it bluntly, a political act.

In other words, the Nobel Committee is, by confering this award, endorsing and encouraging Obama's efforts at international diplomacy, especially in the Middle East and regardign nuclear nonproliferation. They like the direction Obama is heading, and they want him both to succeed in the endeavors he has undertaken and to take his diplomacy further. Whether or not this success and expansion of diplomacy takes place, the Nobel Committee has done the only thing they can to make it so. That is both a legitimate use of the prize and a fairly taditional one.

Ronald Krebs, the author of the Foreign Policy essay I linked to above, lumps aspirational bestowals of the prize in with bestowals upon intranational dissidents and activists in order to conclude:

When the Nobel Peace Prize rewards past accomplishments, it is to be welcomed -- not because it changes the world, but because it celebrates and reaffirms liberal ideals. But in the increasingly frequent cases in which it is bestowed for actors' aspirations and in which it seeks to promote democratic political change, winners beware.

First of all, I don't see anything especially liberal about Alfred Nobel's charge that the prize be awarded "to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses." Modern liberalism has never been especially opposed to standing armies (republicans and communists are the ones who worried about those), and international fraternity and peace congresses are the purview of no particular political philosophy. But whatever. The more important things to note are that 1) the award to Obama seems to fit Nobel's intention quite well (except for that abolition or reduction of standing armies thing), and 2) all of Krebs' data regarding the perverse effect of the prize pertains to the promotion of democratic political change, not to aspirational awards per se.

This brings me to the second reason the dominant take is so wrongheaded. Without a doubt Obama's biggest accomplishments to date have been speeches, especially the Cairo speech. This is what Obama does -- he talks, and he listens to others talking, and he talks in such a way that his audience knows he has listened. Far from being negligible, this is actually a very big deal. I have mentioned this before; Obama is good at politics because he is good at talking to people who are not like him. Not to go completely Arendtian, but speaking is the substance of political action. There is no divide between "giving speeches" and "doing things," and those who think there is reveal themselves to have a technocratic, antipolitical streak.

This is why diplomacy is interesting -- in a world full of nation states given over largely to technocratic administration, one of the only spaces given over to political action is the diplomatic arena. In his "Critique of Violence," Walter Benjamin indicated "the conference, considered as a technique of civil agreement," as one of the only venues for the deployment of purely discursive means of agreement, unalloyed with any violence. Although it would be a stretch to say that any conference with the executive of the US, holder of more military might than the rest of the world combined, is unalloyed with violence, it remains true that diplomacy, giving rise as it does to no law, and employing the whole range of linguistic communication, seems more political and less violent than anything else in the world right now. And if the reemergence of this power, after the last eight years in which diplomacy seemed to vanish from the face of the earth, does not merit a Nobel Peace Prize, I'm not sure what does.

Arendt In a Nutshell

Marx is wrong! (What Marx said.)

For example:

World alienation, and not self-alienation, as Marx thought, has been the hallmark of the modern age. Expropriation, the deprivation of certain groups of their place in the world and their naked exposure to the exigencies of life, created both the original accumulation of wealth and the possibility of transforming this wealth into capital through labor. (The Human Condition, 254-5)

I know from her letters to Jaspers that Arendt found Marx extremely frustrating ("a pain in the neck" are her words). Maybe it was the anxiety of influence...

UPDATE:

I guess Hanna Pitkin said much the same:

Although its [Arendt's criticism of Marx] overall thrust may well be valid and is surely defensible, its detailed formulations are almost always mistaken, sometimes blatantly so. Arendt’s account of Marx, moreover, leaves out about half of that admittedly inconsistent thinker, and what is missing from her Marx remarkably resembles Arendt’s own ideas in The Human Condition, particularly about the social.

(The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 115.)

What sort of activity is exchange?

I've been reading a bunch of Arendt, and, in light of my recent re-reading of Sohn-Rethel, I've noticed something both odd and, I think, revealing about Arendt's understanding of the vita activa--she completely overlooks commodity exchange as a distinctive form of activity.

Arendt's overall project, post-Origins of Totalitarianism, is centered around a rearticulation of active or practical life as of principles and a dignity separate from but equal to that of contemplation. I'm very sympathetic to this project, at least in such broad outlines. I'm especially attracted to her recognition of the fundamental plurality of activities, which sets her apart from all the mythologies of utilitarianism and rational choice action theory. However, I've always been nagged by a sense that her effort to separate out the various modalities of active life--labor, work, action--was itself a bit of a simplification or homogenization. However, nagging doubts do not an assessment make. Now I feel like I'm on somewhat more solid ground. Let me lay out the indicators of the problem:

Arendt's only prolonged discussion of exchange (that I know of) is in the "Work" section of The Human Condition (pp 159-67). The discussion is situated as it is because Arendt thinks that the exchange market is the public sphere corresponding to and growing out of work or fabrication, the making of persistent objects of use or artifacts. In Arendt's words, "homo faber, the builder of the world and the producer of things, can find his proper relationship to other people only by exchanging his products with theirs" (160).

But she immediately introduces a consideration that flagrantly contradicts this proper fit of the market to the artisans as producers. The sentence I just quoted continues by "explaining" this propriety; the artisan finds his proper relation to others in the exchange market "because the products themselves are always produced in isolation" (160-1). This sounds strange, I think, because we immediately think of assembly lines, factories, and cooperation when we think of production. Arendt has an explanation for this--basically, the division of labor within a process of production she associates with labor, the reproduction of life, and the conquest of production by the division of labor is therefore the subordination of work to labor--but I'll leave that aside for now. I think the plausibility of her insistence on the solitude of the artisan can be rescued by reference to such commonplaces as "too many cooks spoil the broth," and the certainty that doing anything "by committee" is sure to be a disaster from the standpoint of the quality of the end result. The work, for Arendt, is characterized by a singleness of intention and attention, and hence the artisan qua artisan is alone.

But for precisely this reason, the people who meet in the market are not artisans qua artisans, as Arendt herself recognizes. "The people who met on the exchange market, to be sure, were no longer the fabricators themselves," she writes; "when homo faber comes out of his isolation, he appears as a merchant and trader and establishes the exchange market in this capacity" (162-3). Therefore, she also claims that exchange value cannot be grounded in any "specific human activity" (164).

So, Arendt, it seems to me, is caught in the uncomfortable position of affirming both that exchange "develops without break and consistently" from "the world of the craftsman and the experience of fabrication" (166) and that this exchange presupposes a change in the personae and a dissociation from any actual activity of making things.

This is where Sohn-Rethel can meaningfully supplement Arendt. The recognition that commodity exchange is a separate mode of activity, and a specific from of human interaction, undermines the assumption that Arendt shares with the utilitarians and economists from whom she so radically diverges otherwise: the assumption that a generalized "utility" can be unproblematically extrapolated from the concrete uses of the objects we make. This presumptive link between use and utility is the unthought ground of modern economics, and exposing the absence of any such link is the ongoing task of the critique of political economy.