Reversing the Primacy of Political Action: Thinking Politics and Technology with Arendt

Since the 1990s, political theorists have widely mobilized Arendt’s theory of political action to theorize and assess the impact of digital media on the public sphere. These contributions, however, refer directly to her substantive-normative concepts without attending to how she develops them. This approach, I argue, has obscured the complex interplay between technology and political action in Arendt’s analysis of the public sphere. Drawing from Arendt’s phenomenological methodology (rather than her substantive-normative concepts), I propose that a more effective approach begins with a phenomenological analysis of the “world” as already shaped by the technological environment. This approach centers around the phenomenological notion of “intentionality” that shows (i) the fundamentally intentional character of political action and (ii) how technology plays a key role in (de)stabilizing this intentional structure. The result of this article is a methodological blueprint, consistent with Arendt’s methodology, to re-examine the digital transformation of the public sphere.