Action and the materiality of story

10-03-2024

“It is because of this already existing web of human relationships, with its innumerable, conflicting wills and intentions, that action almost never achieves its purpose; but it is also because of this medium, in which action alone is real, that it “produces” stories with or without intention as naturally as fabrication produces tangible things. These stories may then be recorded in documents and monuments, they may be visible in use objects or art works, they may be told and retold and worked into all kinds of material.”
(Arendt, The Human Condition, 1958, p. 184)

 
To act is to take that contingent leap into the world, with an intention, but also with the knowledge that that intention may never be realized. We can never foresee the ways our actions will be received, ripple up against the actions of others, and rebound in a sea of humans whose capacity to act “means that the unexpected can be expected from [them].” Amidst this turbulence Hannah Arendt offers us an assurance: that our action will produce stories. And these stories may be recorded and reworked.

This assurance is meaningful for me as a scholar concerned with bearing witness to the disappeared. (This also, of course, can be read as a warning; individuals cannot know just how their actions will be remembered or reproduced in the world, and this can be a scary thought. But, for my discussion here, I am considering the possibilities afforded by the production of story.) The specific disappearances I am concerned with are victims of neoliberal dehousing, which creates what some activists I work with have called “the exclusion zone” or “the class of non-being.” In other words, though often coterminous, I make the distinction between disappearance and death. Unhoused citizens are pathologized, stigmatized, and largely ignored by politicians, policymakers, and, yes, even researchers. The rising mortality rates of individuals living without housing are treated as inevitable. Despite these conditions, housing activism has a vibrant history.

All activism is an attempt to register a kind of disappearance. To do so is to attempt to rally a plurality of citizens around a common concern, drawing on the etymological root of a “rallying point” as the site where individuals come together for action. To these ends, activists have long been acting and speaking in public, reliant on a spirit of publicness, and involved in the cultivation of public “rallying points.” And while it is true that such efforts have not achieved every intended purpose, their acts have materialized stories of unique heroes in the struggles for justice. Arendt notes that the “hero” in the Homeric sense is not the seemingly “heroic,” but the free participant, “about whom a story could be told.” My research is concerned not only with these actions of free beings, but the way in which they have been archived. The production of stories in the movement for housing justice has led to a brilliant mixture of strategies and aesthetic practices for the recording, reworking, and preservation of stories.

Activism is often tied to questions of memory. Questions like, “how can we change?” are tied to the problematic of “where do we come from?” or “how did we get here?” What story is there to tell here? The task, then, is to map out the existing power relations, so often obscured by hegemonic narratives of progress. The movement for housing justice is, for example, characterized by ongoing commemorative practice. Memorials and monuments not only pay homage to dehoused citizens who have died, but they cultivate a public space for iterative storytelling. Across North America, there are vast collections of poems, decades in the making, that have been reworked into songs and speeches; numerous artworks have been passed down and reimagined; material evidence of the housing crisis lives on in the form of archives and counter-archives.

What Arendt indicates for us is that “the agent,” the one who sets the wheels in motion by acting in public, cannot predict the eventual outcome of their action. Not only that, in the face of brutal violence, the actor may never live to observe the result of their intended contributions. Countless housing activists have died from the long-term health impacts of living outside, even while they fought for the right to housing. Yet, by acting, they can be assured that they have contributed to the production of stories—their own, as well as the material into which the story can be repurposed, reified, and preserved.

There is an important distinction to be made between the material—the “work” in Arendtian terms—and the stories, which emerge from action. The stories, for Arendt, insist upon a “who.” On the other hand, “what” a person was is constituted by the work, the material, they leave behind. Arendt contrasts Socrates with Aristotle, arguing that we know more about Aristotle’s opinions—“what” he was—but we feel more intimately connected to “who” Socrates was, his story. And so, while it is important that activists have sought to preserve material evidence from various struggles, it is worth emphasizing that their commemorative practices disclose the various agents who have “insert[ed] [themselves] into the world [to] begin a story of [their] own.”  

And here is what is so groundbreaking about this particularly Arendtian insistence: the action of an agent from the class of non-being can result in their insertion into a class of “heroes”—beings about whom a story can be told. This capacity to insert oneself into the world from beyond the boundary of political exclusion in neoliberal capitalism demonstrates the rich potential for revitalizing the public realm. The agent-activist invites us to pay attention to the actions of those who are suffering, to participate in the paradoxical appearance of the disappeared. It is as some activists have told me, that action can return “ghosts” to the visible and sonic registers of public life.

References:
Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. The University of Chicago Press.

About the Author: 
timothy martin is a scholar of education, concerned with housing activism and the way activists cultivate educative environments through practices of memory work. His dissertation, Organizing Remembrance: Publicness, commemoration, and counter-archival practices at the Toronto Homeless Memorial traces the emergence of a monthly memorial event for citizens who have died in Toronto without housing.