Arendt’s Pearl-diver and Le Guin’s Bag-lady: Two Figures of Political Storytelling and Examples

This paper is an experiment. It is an attempt to write ‘from the heart’; or, as Walter Benjamin (1969) put it, ‘to let the wick of [one’s] life be consumed completely by the gentle flame of [one’s] story’. This is a scary (and liberating) proposition for me: a half-hearted Nietzschean, Marxist political theorist by training now dabbling in ethnography and, of course, long-time story lover and (less long) editor. It is an experiment taken both out of desperation and desire. Namely, the desperation of the blank page and the institutional mandate to write. But also, the desire to tell the diverse, dappled, and developing tales of postcapitalist, ecological futures or what Donna Haraway (2007) has called ‘ecotones’ and Rosi Braidotti (2014) has called for as ‘political fiction’. Drawing on my fieldwork in three intentional communities (although they debate the name) that attempt to practice and research routes to a postcapitalist, multispecies future—Tamera (Portugal), Ionia (Alaska), and Findhorn (Scotland)—this paper refuses to let the contradictions, naivety, and impossibility of the task mute its storytelling. Instead, following in the theoretical footsteps of feminist new materialist thinkers like Haraway and Braidotti, it attempts both to sketch and perform a storytelling research practice capable of sweet-talking and dragging ecological politics beyond the borders of western metaphysical and epistemological assumptions and into the messy, troubled world of the Anthropocene. To this end, the paper explores two figures of the political storyteller interwoven with what John van Mannen (1986/2011) has called ethnographic impressionist tales: ‘personalized accounts of fleeting moments of fieldwork cast in dramatic form’. The first figure is Hannah Arendt’s (1969) ‘pearl-diver’ who appears in her reflections on Walter Benjamin’s description of the storyteller. The storyteller qua pearl-diver descends to ocean depths of history to pry from it ‘redemptive narratives’ (Benhabib 1990) capable of suturing the gap between past and present created by modernity’s devouring of tradition. The second figure is Ursula Le Guin’s (1986) bag-lady ‘carrier-bag theory of fiction’ taken up Haraway (2016). Unlike the heroic pearl-diver seeking redemption, the bag-lady is a wandering vagabond, gathering, collecting, discarding, re-storying. The storyteller qua bag-lady eschews the depths and stays on the surface, wandering the streets. She is feral and polyvocal, often muttering to herself, narrating, and threading possible ways forward: ways of being and knowing and living and dying together in the Anthropocene. Her stories do not have heroes. Rather they abound in dead-ends, new starts, lost faith, and wavering hope. While the bag-lady comes out on top, she is not the hero. The Anthropocene, as Haraway (2016) and Chakrabarty (2021) have both recently pointed out, has forcefully made us leave behind the friend/enemy, hero/antagonist salvation narrative. Instead, we must cobble something else together from postcapitalist ruins. The paper seeks to tell some stories, gathered, and winnowed, and cobbled together from real-life collectives and their attempts to practice, imagine, and story this postcapitalist world. Part impressionist ethnography tale and part confession, this paper experiments in writing politics differently.