Technologies of Wordlessness and Embodied Publicity: Hannah Arendt and the Digital Condition

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to assess the public character of digital media through Hannah Arendt's concept of worldliness. Arendt's critique of modernity shows that technology must be understood within the broader process of world alienation associated with the rise of the social and the ascendancy of animal laborans. Building on recent phenomenological interpretations of Arendt, I argue that her concept of worldliness involves an embodied dimension which, whilst it has gained interest in Arendt scholarship in recent years, has not been linked to the rapid technological change of our time. Embodied situatedness conditions the perspectivity through which plural actors encounter a common world and appear to one another. Digital mediation transforms this relation by allowing public appearance to circulate beyond the bodily situation in which it originates, thereby attenuating the public relevance of embodied position. Digital media can thus expand public visibility, while at the same time erode the embodied aspect of worldliness, allowing them to be understood as technologies of worldlessness.