Universal humans?
Eagleton, Morrison, Sontag
Curious about a comment of Terry Eagleton’s from How To Read English Literature:
human beings are not fundamentally all that different from each other, a truth postmodernists are reluctant to concede. We share an enormous amount in common simply by virtue of being human.
Certainly this is true on a biological level, but if we take even a cursory look at Toni Morrison’s work1 I can't help but feel he's underplaying some aspects of the human experience that are the source of divisions so powerful (struggling to word this; I'm trying to say that he doesn't have the lived experience of what epistemologies of race do to people of colour, so it's all very well for him to dwell on the things that unite.) He writes from a position of privilege, of some power. What perhaps needs considering is who does the shaping and defining of others; in short, who does the looking.
Moreover, one can be made to seem radically different to each other; this is the whole point of Morrison's American Africanism: that the Africanist other has been constructed as a point of difference so alien and taboo, to represent a negative image of whiteness that can be vilified, held at arm's length, examined but never loved, studied but not welcomed to study. There is no mutuality, no shared model of the human in the construction of these paradigms of blackness. Rather, Morrison writes, representations of whiteness 'appear almost always in conjunction with representations of black or Africanist people who are dead, impotent, or under complete control' (p.33). Here, there is only control, and if one controls another, one cannot consider the two equal. For a critic so aware of Enlightenment framings of the human, Eagleton seems to miss the point of the inevitability of slavery as proof of freedom: 'we should not be surprised', writes Morrison, quoting historian Orlando Patterson, 'that slavery occured during the Enlightenment', rather, 'we should be surprised if it did not'. Freedom is defined in terms of its binary opposite and so, as the lodestar of the nascent America, it needed an absolute opposite to make the assurance cast-iron.
It isn't just about race. Disability scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson writes that 'to be disabled is to have a body that is named.' This is another quirk of power dynamics: those humans in power, with agency, do the naming; those who are held as opposite receive the names. The self-determination of a name is a well-known and long-standing metric of power: those who give the names are those who are able to colonise they name. It is not so much that names are signifiers of identity; rather, the signifier of identity is who did the naming in the first place. The coloniser, after he plants the flag, names the soil under his boots after himself, as though this will make the soil an extension of himself.
Biologically, then, one can recognise human-as-species, but it is much harder to argue successfully that the same can apply to human-as-concept. We should, following Susan Sontag, not assume the existence of a universal 'we'.2 To do so equalises pain that has no business being equalised, blinds one to the truth of another's suffering.
Playing in the Dark—Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992)
Regarding the Pain of Others