Notes on Narrating Humanity

1.

In suggesting that to be (a) human is to have a story, Hannah Arendt brings us near a kind of nexus we inhabit irrespective of choice or decision.2 What it is to approach, and then perhaps to move beyond, that within which we are held is an important matter as we begin to explore the depth and beauty of Cynthia Franklin’s achievement in Narrating Humanity, which shifts our understanding such that the human is less an exalted identity and more a bloody battleground, a terrible obligation, and a set of hard-won chances. On that ground, the first casualty is the generality of the field as such, which is constantly subject to a reduction of common sociality to abstract singularity. Already detached from and opposed to the much-more-than-humanness of its surround, the human is further constrained to shrink itself so that it might be instantiated. To be human is to be a human such that the human is given in and as the particular case where what’s at stake is not necessarily representativeness or exemplarity but the sheer fact of the singularity that natality is supposed to provide. And yet, natality and what it provides are still subject to withholding. Moreover, the capacity for proper individuation and the freedom(s) it implies are often understood both as precondition and effect of the capacity to narrate or to be narrated. And if the telling of a life is an essential part of having a life, these are, in turn, all bound up with what it is to (have the capacity to) write a life. This nexus is broken, and it seems always to have been meant to be broken, as it keeps instantiating the serial breaks that attend the strict convergence of the capacity to have, tell, and write a story with the concept of the human. Let’s call this network of fissures, scores, and incommensurabilities at the intersection of narrative, conceptuality, and speciation—where race and gender will have turned out to be foregiven; where polis will have turned out to be implied—not simply the crisis of the human but the human as crisis. What does it mean, finally, to assume this hyperlocality as habitat and general condition? What is it to live in the general imposition of a claim upon the human? We know the deadly impact constantly visited upon those whose claims upon the human are denied. We now must consider what is lost when such claims are admitted and what is found when they are relinquished. What else is there to have? What if there is nothing else to have? What if all is foregiven in that nothingness? What if therein lies the common force of abolition and absolution?

2.

Why do we need to wrestle with the human? Why did Abraham need to wrestle with God? Why did Frederick Douglass need to wrestle with Edward Covey? What need is fulfilled in and by this defiant codependence? Why accede to this jurisdiction, within which all of those who are constrained to make a claim upon the human are, at best, mere petitioners and, at worst, have no standing at all? What has it meant to live, explore, experiment, improvise, study in and with this fallenness? To be clear, I am not seeking to extend or renew any thoroughgoing critique of the human, since thoroughgoing critique—like the writing/theorizing of a life—is a quintessential expression of the human. I am asking if the concept of the human, continually reimposed in every denial and defense and understanding of and in every claim upon the human, is adequate to name and think and renew those practices in which we have engaged in order to survive in and thrive beyond the age of the human, which is given in and as ethical, ecological, sociological catastrophe.

3.

As Franklin tells us, with gentle urgency, we can’t theorize this seemingly intractably theoretical problem away. And yet, I think she also teaches us that to say that we can’t theorize it away is not to say that we should theorize with or for or within it. It might rather be to say that we might walk away from theorizing precisely insofar as theorizing is entangled with and implied in the exclusions and injuries and attenuated chances that accrue to telling and having a story.

And what have critique and theorization ever been but a modality of combat or, if you will, wrestling? And has there ever been a separation of the telling or writing of a life from wrestling’s brutal relationality? This is, again, a Douglass imperative, wherein wrestling is the privileged, foundational figure of critical consciousness’s double edge or bind, its endless double session. What if the matter or the writing of (individual) lives, which is always the very instantiation and embodiment of the human, is the very structure of betrayal, given, in an all but unbearable paradox, in the liberatory’s capitulative redoubling of the liberal?

4.

With great subtlety, Franklin allows and requires us to consider the distinction to be made between life writing and the writing of a life. Does it map onto a distinction that might be made between the human and (Sylvia Wynter’s overrepresented and overrepresentative) man?3 Can there be a dehiscence between the human and its necessary distribution in the figure of a man in all his abstract equivalence? What if the matter or the writing of individual lives has always been, at last and from the very beginning, a kind of unaerated aridity, a kind of hermetically sealed desert of cracks and faults whose surface you walk over but never touch insofar as it is covered with the hard and horribly smooth reflective transparency of the mirror of nature? No, the point isn’t the revival of life that will have been given in its rescue from the solitary confinement of a life. This will have been no more fertile than the impossible cultivation of the dry terrain that marks the imaginary distance between the two most extensionless points of all—existence and inexistence. But what if the subsistent circumsistence that surrounds and dissolves and releases, while undergirding and undermining, the human universe is somehow borne and indicated in and against the grain of the writing of (a) life? I believe that this question is what Franklin renews for us with a kind of careful devotion that is at once extraordinary and characteristic.

5.

My suspicion—or, perhaps more precisely, my fear—is that there’s nothing in the notion of life that can be salvaged in the wake of its individuation into a life, just as there may be nothing left of the human in the wake of its instantiation in the figure of (a) man. But Franklin hasn’t just calmed my fear; she has made it possible for me more resolutely to face it. She offers this to her readers by doing that to which she will have paid attention. She joins her object of study, which perhaps can’t be named, which the terms life writing or narrating humanity perhaps cannot name even in the righteousness of that naming, which is less like wrestling but more like dancing, which she shares with us as ceremonial protocol. Another way to put it is that in her work she helps us see how to make a living. In her work, subsistence, which remains in spite of the terrible war that Ivan Illich shows to have been waged against it, comes into relief or, more precisely, comes to our relief as topographic and choreographic invitation.4 We are enjoined and enabled to abide with the furious, volatile, loving violence that moves mountains. One way to consider this movement she allows us to join is as an earthlike turn away from the metaphysics of individuation that works indigeneity’s mobile situation. This ethical, social, and aesthetic force is geophysical, cosmological. To defend Mauna Kea is to move with the mountain, as the mountain, with the wavelike recess of its rising, in the animate, aeronautical grounding whose trace narration bears but that it all but stills and subdivides and buries. To move mountains, in protection of the mountain, in the awareness that mountains move and live, that they are conscious, removes from the confines of human identity those practices and dispositions that will have sustained the human differential in its destined and practical abolition of human identity. What if all the human ever has been is just this beautiful capacity and imperative to be other than itself against the grain of coloniality’s carceral reduction of earth to man’s dominion and its constant relegation of whatever it loves to hate and whatever it hates to desire to the zone of the inhuman? If we are human only insofar as we can be and always already are more than that, it is given in the movement of and the movement to save Mauna Kea. We wrestle where we are but only at our best only insofar as we dance ground’s constantly evolving, always mobile elsewhere, in coresistance for and with the mountain. That story, wherein the making of a living and the poetics of life writing come together into their ownerless own as radical chor(e)ography and that Franklin tells again and again and again in this lovely book, is the endless and inexhaustible song of the earth. The last word here, which isn’t last but is a lasting opening, goes to Emalani Case, who exceeds the logic of the case in the grounded, grounding narration Franklin amplifies.

Every day, three times a day, we stood at the pu‘uhonua and chanted and danced for us: for our continuance as people tied to the land, to the mountain, and to our inherited right to be Indigenous in our place. Each chant was a practice in breath, in how to exhale meaning wrapped in vowel sounds, carried by vibrato coming from the gut, and maintained by ancient vocabularies constantly made new. Each dance was a practice in using my breath intentionally, holding it where necessary, releasing it where it could help my body reach down to the land or to the sky above, shaping stories with my hands.5

Fred Moten’s most recent work, with Brandon López and Gerald Cleaver, is the blacksmiths, the flowers (Reading Group Records, 2024). He works in the Departments of Performance Studies and Comparative Literature at New York University.

Notes

1. 1. Cynthia G. Franklin, Narrating Humanity: Life Writing and Movement Politics from Palestine to Mauna Kea (Fordham University Press, 2023), 1.

2. 2. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (University of Chicago Press, 1998), 97.

3. 3. Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Truth/Power/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 257–337.

4. 4. Ivan Illich, “The War Against Subsistence,” in Shadow Work (Marion Boyars, 1981).

5. 5. Case quoted in Franklin, Narrating Humanity, 210.