Donna Haraway on Hannah Arendt

A few days ago, I posted this quote from Donna Haraway’s book Staying With The Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene on all of my social media. In this passage Haraway is discussing Hannah Arendt’s work about Adolf Eichmann, a chief organizer of the Holocaust who claimed that he was simply doing his duty and obeying his orders. Arendt’s study of Eichmann, Eichmann in Jerusalem, gave us the phrase “the banality of evil”:

“Arendt witnessed in Eichmann not an incomprehensible monster, but something much more terrifying—she saw commonplace thoughtlessness. That is, here was a human being unable to make present to himself what was absent, what was not himself, what the world in its sheer not-one-selfness is and what claims-to-be inhere in not-oneself. Here was someone who could not be a wayfarer, could not entangle, could not track the lines of living and dying, could not cultivate response-ability, could not make present to itself what it is doing, could not live in consequences or with consequence, could not compost. Function mattered, duty mattered, but the world did not matter for Eichmann. The world does not matter in ordinary thoughtlessness. The hollowed-out spaces are all filled with assessing information, determining friends and enemies, and doing busy jobs; negativity, the hollowing out of such positivity, is missed, an astonishing abandonment of thinking. This quality was not an emotional lack, a lack of compassion, although surely that was true of Eichmann, but a deeper surrender to what I would call immateriality, inconsequentiality, or, in Arendt’s and also my idiom, thoughtlessness.”

I posted it largely without comment. Afterwards I realized that my various circles of left-leaning friends probably read it as an accusation against those on the American right. After all, that’s what we often mean these days, when we discuss the history of genocide.

But that’s not what I meant at all: I posted it because it horrified me about us, about myself.

Consider:

Someone who could not make present to itself what it is doing. Someone who fills spaces with determining friends and enemies.

Someone who could not cultivate response-ability. Someone who could not live in consequences or with consequences. Someone to whom the world does not matter.

Immateriality.

Inconsequentiality.

Thoughtlessness.

That is us, my loves. Not exclusively those people over there.

Before you get defensive—but I’m tired and just need to unwind and I have to be on Facebook because all of my family lives in a different state—let’s zoom out. I’m not interested in exclusively individual blame for complex collective problems. (See, anything else I’ve written here about social media.) It’s quite obvious that a certain set of authentic relational possibilities has been closed off to us, as much by the conditions of late-capitalist life as by social media itself. Facebook, and our reliance on it, is only ever a symptom, if an incredibly damning one.

I do, however, believe that we need to be aware of the consequences of our only-too-gleeful enshallowment, not only within social media spaces but everywhere. It is in wayfaring and entanglement that we can best survive a rapidly changing world. We can still resist the creation of hollow spaces that need to be, impossibly, filled with nothingness.

The stakes are very high.