François Matarasso

I’ve been reading, and reading about, Hannah Arendt. She’s one of the thinkers I admire whilst having reservations about some of their ideas or positions. That’s never seemed problematic: I don’t look for or trust gurus. I can learn a lot from working out why I disagree with something I’ve just read. But Arendt has a complicated reputation — too high in some quarters, too low in others — which, as usual, says more about the judges than the object of their judgement.

On The Portable Arendt, I read that the volume contains ‘several other provocative essays’ and once again I stumble on the adjective. I’ve always disliked the idea of provoking anyone, and never more than when I’m asked by a conference organiser to offer a ‘provocation’. There are contexts in which the word can be meaningful but they tend to be associated with violence.

In the 1930s, Germany regularly claimed to have been ‘provoked’ into military action by a smaller and weaker country, a deceit it ultimately used to justify the invasion of Poland in 1939. In revolutionary – or emancipatory, according to your point of view – politics, provocation by words or violence can be intended to incite a repressive reaction from a dominant power, with the ultimate objective of forcing people to take sides. Hannah Arendt might sometimes have written in that revolutionary spirit but if so she was intelligent and principled enough to do it knowing why and what the consequences might be.

But all this is very far from the kind of provocations to which the art world is so partial. It is still possible to have a succès de scandale but even the most controversial works have little resonance beyond their immediate circle. As far as art is concerned, provocation was priced in long ago, to use the current jargon. The irony about the so-called ‘culture wars’ is that they so rarely have anything to do with actual culture. It would be more accurate to call them belief wars but that might be too near the knuckle. It would at least underline that they are not so different from many other wars we have suffered.

I do not think I have ever said or written anything provocative; certainly I have not intended to provoke. Without a reason of the first importance and urgency, it seems to me ill-mannered to seek to provoke others. Life is hard enough without strangers making it harder. Someone may have heard me speak or read something I’ve written and been incensed by my ideas: perhaps they have even accused me of provocation. If so, I reject the charge. Unless a speaker has deliberately sought to anger or shock their listeners – in short, to manipulate their emotions – it seems to me they should be assumed to be expressing their views in good faith. Provocation is generally in the mind of the provoked.

I don’t think Hannah Arendt was a person who sought to provoke for the sake of it but she was committed to her idea of truth and would defend that to the end, even when it led her to take positions that, in another context, she might have rejected. And that seems to me admirable. Being able to trust a writer to speak the truth as they understand it is the basis for all meaningful philosophic, democratic, human discourse.

This is not a provocation: it is just an opinion, honestly held, with which you may or may not agree, if you have any interest in it at all. But what you make of it is your responsibility, not mine.

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PS Peter Drucker disliked being called a guru and once said that journalists only used it of him because charlatan was too long to fit into a headline.