Human Condition - Universalmuseum Joanneum

180 — 181
Adam Budak
9 Nicolas Bourriaud, “Precarious
Constructions. Answers to Jacques
Rancière on Art and Politics,” in
open Cahier on Art and the Public
Domain, NAi Publishers SKOR
2009/No. 17, p. 23.
10 Ibid., p. 32.
11 The Invisible Committee, The
Coming Insurrection, p. 9.
12 Ibid., p. 96.
13 Ibid., p. 15.
14 Ibid., p. 19.
15 Arendt, The Human Condition,
p. 7.
16 Ibid., p. 178.
17 Ibid., p. 180.
18 Ibid., p. 182.
which constitutes a society of generalized disponibility, driven “by the horror of expiry,”
where nothing is more decried than “the steadfastness, stickiness, viscosity of things
inanimate and animate alike.”9 “Precarious is etymologically,” as Bourriaud reminds us,
“‘that which only exists thanks to a reversible authorization.’ The precaria was the field
cultivated for a set period of time, independently of the laws that govern property. An
object is said to be precarious if it has no definite status and an uncertain future or
final destiny: it is held, in abeyance, waiting, surrounded by irresolution. It occupies a
transitory territory.”10
We are waiting. We are pending, in anticipation. A political pamphlet, “The Coming
Insurrection,” authored by an anonymous collective, the Invisible Committee states
harshly: “Everyone agrees. It’s about to explode.”11 We keep on waiting however as they
claim: “It’s useless to wait – for a breakthrough, for the revolution, the nuclear apocalypse
or a social movement. To go on waiting is madness. The catastrophe is not coming,
it is there. We are already situated within the collapse of civilization. It is within
this reality that we must choose sides.”12 The rhetoric of crisis and the rhetoric of power
overlap; the sharing of sensibility and the elaboration of sharing is an urge: the uncovering
of what is common and the building of a force. Empathy acts as a measure of the
intensity of sharing.13 Still another question is being articulated, as odd as obvious
and vulnerable: “How do we find each other?”14 In the heart of the riots in Greece and
France, while praying in the shadow of a temple, a call for insurrection is uttered.
The artists invited to the exhibition Human Condition. Empathy and Emancipation
in Precarious Times map the critical space of the human condition, concentrating
in particular on Hannah Arendt’s action, one of the fundamental human activities
that, together with labor and work, compose vita activa and correspond to the basic
conditions under which, according to Arendt, life on earth has been given to man.
The human condition of labor is life itself whereas work provides an “artificial” world
of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings and its human condition
is worldliness. Action, as Arendt indicates, “is the only activity that goes on directly
between men without the intermediary of things or matter and as such, it corresponds
to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on earth and
inhabit the world.”15 Action is linked to the principle of beginning as “to act, in its most
general sense, means to take an initiative, to begin (…), to set something in motion.”
Action too relates to speech “because the primordial and specifically human act must
at the same time contain the answer to the question asked for every newcomer: ‘who
are you?’16 (…) This revelatory quality of speech and action comes to the fore where
people are with others and neither for nor against them – that is, in sheer human
togetherness.”17 A call for “who” and “with” lies at the foundation of Hannah Arendt’s
web of human relationships; in-betweeness and togetherness are their most essential
platforms of operation: “action and speech go on between men, as they are directed
toward them, and they retain their agent-revealing capacity even if their content is
exclusively ‘objective,’ concerned with the matters of the world of things in which men
move, which physically lies between them and out of which arise their specific, objective,
worldly interests. These interests constitute, in the word’s most literal significance,
something which inter-est, which lies between people and therefore can relate
and bind them together. Most action and speech is concerned with this in-between,
which varies with each group of people, so that most words and deeds are about some
worldly objective reality in addition to being a disclosure of the acting and speaking
agent.”18 Action as an agent of the frailty of human affairs is a communal affair – as
distinguished from fabrication, it is never possible in isolation. For Arendt, to be isolated
is to be deprived of the capacity to act.19