Key Arguments

• The web exists wherever men live together and immediately registers consequences of new actions and speeches
• Actions start new processes that emerge as each newcomer’s unique life story and affect others’ stories
• Stories are not products; they tell us more about their ‘hero’ than products tell about their makers
• Nobody is the author or producer of his own life story: one is actor and sufferer, not author

Source Quotes

To dispense with this disclosure, if indeed it could ever be done, would mean to transform men into something they are not; to deny, on the other hand, that this disclosure is real and has consequences of its own is simply unrealistic. The realm of human affairs, strictly speaking, consists of the web of human relationships which exists wherever men live together. The disclosure of the “who” through speech, and the setting of a new beginning through action, always fall into an already existing web where their immediate consequences can be felt.

The disclosure of the “who” through speech, and the setting of a new beginning through action, always fall into an already existing web where their immediate consequences can be felt. Together they start a new process which eventually emerges as the unique life story of the newcomer, affecting uniquely the life stories of all those with whom he comes into contact. 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.

They tell us more about their subjects, the “hero” in the center of each story, than any product of human hands ever tells us about the master who produced it, and yet they are not products, properly speaking. Although everybody started his life by inserting himself into the human world through action and speech, nobody is the author or producer of his own life story. In other words, the stories, the results of action and speech, reveal an agent, but this agent is not an author or producer.

Key Concepts

• The realm of human affairs, strictly speaking, consists of the web of human relationships which exists wherever men live together.
• Together they start a new process which eventually emerges as the unique life story of the newcomer, affecting uniquely the life stories of all those with whom he comes into contact.
• Although everybody started his life by inserting himself into the human world through action and speech, nobody is the author or producer of his own life story.

Context

Section 25; defines the political realm as relational web and introduces stories as its natural ‘products’ absent authorship.