for neue:theorie: Postkoloniale Theorie – (selbst-)kritisches Erzählen, Leipzig, October 22, 2022

To moderate—the word resounds as a soft imperative. I hear its appeasing nature, the implicit authority the moderator is given to bring instances into dialog and at the same time to pacify their relationship, to soften the passage between the one and the other. Secondly, I can’t help but connect the moderator to my object of study: the medium. A moderator is a medium of sorts, with diverse techno-culturally determined ways of operating and performing. Ideally, she has gained techniques allowing her to be neither too present nor too absent in the exchanges she moderates; similar to a medium diffracting rays of light, redirecting them, slowing them down, so their spectrum may become perceptible to the senses. But does she want to slow down or redirect anything? A medium can also be an in-between that connects what is separated. Or it can provide a frame for what is happening by which it constrains and conditions it. Prima facie, there seems to be a certain distance, a detachment in a moderator’s performance, as she frames the discourse of others without having to speak in her own name. On the other hand, my mind also wanders to the referee in a mixed martial art fight, my sport of predilection. In that case, the moderator quickly moves between the blows, avoids them, yet intervenes when a fighter is down before too much damage is done. She has an obligation to fairness, to render what is due to each part. It carries more responsibility and engagement than it might initially seem.

I may have too many cards in the game to moderate it. So I would like to slightly disobey the game of moderation and instead of providing a frame, offer a perspective. What could be of interest to us tonight is to think about the form of sociality created by such an event where three people (plus one) discuss their praxis of creating and fostering myriad alternative ways of telling the histories of subaltern subjects whether by editing, publishing, translating or by writing (auto)theory or poetry, and thus, countering hegemonic ways of writing history. To grasp these practices, I think about what black studies scholar, philosopher, and Jamaican poet Sylvia Wynter in her 2015 Manifesto calls the “Found Ceremony”—a ceremony which allows us to redefine “who-we-are-as-humans.” This “Found Ceremony” should allow humans to transition from the Western bourgeois and bio-politically determined homo oeconomicus and its eugenist and racist praxis of being human to what she calls homo narrans: That is, we have to properly become the homo narrans we are, the living beings who institute themselves as who they are through the stories they tell and the cosmogonies they create. (I’ll come back to this in a bit.)

What reunites us tonight is the question of how alternate narratives play a role in dealing with the ghosts of colonial capitalism and its principle of distinction, hierarchization, and subjection of bodies coupled with value extraction through procedures of enclosure—that is, through the ex- and appropriation of anything that yields exchange value: territory, data, natural resource, bodies. The territorial form of enclosure has expanded to the sky and it seems that soon enough, it will reach Mars. Of course, the form of colonialism has changed: the empire form and beginning from the end of the 19th century, the nation-state form, while not extinct, have given place to transnational economic actors who provide infrastructures of communication on which past colonized countries have been made entirely dependent (I’m thinking of the role of Facebook in Africa, for instance). And while new forms of value extraction can be deployed with total disregard to national borders, they produce further enclosures and a new distribution of the earth. People, whose survival has been made impossible in their own countries, are forced to cross myriad borders to come to inhospitable northern countries in the hopes that life will be different. As Achille Mbembe has recently argued in his description of what he calls “the new Nomos of the Earth,” refugees now carry borders in and as their own bodies thanks to advanced algorithmic tools of surveillance. Borders follow them wherever they go—from the inhabitability of their country in the wake of colonialism and capitalist extraction to the camps and the inhospitality of northern countries. The vessel of the border is now the body-on-the-move of the refugee—qualified by her skin color, DNA, passport and data. Against the borderization of bodies, Mbembe asks how we should inhabit the planet as equitably as possible, re-membering our damaged earth, reassembling it as an integrated system in which the human and non-human are all interlinked.

Like Achille Mbembe, Sylvia Wynter seeks a new form of universality against and beyond the dialectics of identity and difference, self-possession and dispossession. What she proposes is a new cosmogony that would not replicate processes of othering. What she calls the “Found Ceremony” is her answer. Expanding to class and race Judith Butler’s description of gender as a performance based on a “fictive construction,” Wynter insists that being human is always a doing, a praxis. We humans are hybrids, both biological beings and beings of the word. We create cosmogonies, myths, stories of who we are as humans, stories which, in turn, give us the frame of reference and the codes to perform as who and what we are. These cosmogonies are always genre specific, in the sense that they describe different, specific practices of being human. The genre of being human specific to the past 200 years is a biological Darwinian one: the Homo Oeconomicus.

Yet this notion of the “universal human species” I also put forth on the basis of the Ceremony Found’s new and revalorizing answer to the question of who-we-are, as a species whose “universality” is not merely secured in purely biologically absolute terms by the empirical fact of our common genetic heritage...this “universality” is also secured by the Ceremony Found’s meta-Darwinian and meta-homo sapiens proposal that we are co-human because subject to the same laws of Auto-institution as a hybridly third level of existence—that is, of the human defined as Homo Narrans.

I propose, therefore, that within the terms of the new answer or response that the Ceremony Found gives to the question of who-we-are…, we humans cannot pre-exist our cosmogonies or origin myths/stories/narratives anymore than a bee…can pre-exist its beehive. [1]

Reflecting on this arrangement of people, voices and texts here tonight, I wonder if we can understand this sociality on the basis of what Wynter calls the “Found Ceremony.” Aren’t we performing this “Found Ceremony” tonight—affirming that being human is a praxis determined by and thus transformable through the way we narrate, produce fictions and histories of who we are as humans?

                                                                                               Katia Schwerzmann, Leipzig, October 22, 2022

[1] Wynter, Sylvia. “The Ceremony Found: Towards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn, its Autonomy of Human Agency and Extraterritoriality of (Self-)Cognition.” In Black Knowledges/Black Struggles: Essays in Critical Epistemology, edited by Jason R. Ambroise, and Sabine Broeck, 185–252. Liverpool University Press, 2015, p. 194, 213.