Narrative Collapse

“Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour, Rains from the sky a meteoric shower Of facts . . . they lie unquestioned, uncombined. Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill Is daily spun; but there exists no loom To weave it into fabric”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay, Huntsman, What Quarry?

If we stop to think about the various technologies that structure our social lives, for better and for worse, we may fail to note one of our oldest and most reliable tools, one with which we are all familiar and which we deploy on a daily basis, so much so that we barely take notice of it. The technology I have in mind is the narrative form, otherwise known as story-telling, and I’m going to argue that this tool is getting glitchy.

I know. Describing narrative as a technology will seem like a stretch depending on how you define technology, which, as I’ve argued on a number of occasions, is a rather more complicated task than one might imagine before undertaking it. For what it’s worth, though, I am not alone in conceiving of narrative as a kind of technology.

“The primary purpose of narrative,” media scholar Katherine Hayles argued several years ago, “is to search for meaning,” which makes “narrative an essential technology for human beings, who can arguably be defined as meaning-seeking animals.”

Hayles makes at least three distinct claims in that sentence, but let’s start by focusing on the idea that narrative is a technology. Of course, it is easy to see how various technologies shape the use of narrative—writing, the codex, film, etc.—but Hayles is claiming that the narrative form itself is a technology. To go along with this claim we need to grant, as I think we should, that the technological is not limited to material artifacts. It can include a variety of immaterial techniques that we might use to accomplish any number of tasks. Consider, for example, of one of our most discussed technologies of late, the algorithm. Yes, algorithms tend to operate in conjunction with complex and sophisticated machines and devices, but they are themselves simply processes or sets of rules to be applied to a particular problem or situation.

Narrative, too, is a deceptively simple technique deployed by the human mind in order to make sense of the world. That is not its only purpose, of course—it instructs, gives pleasure, aides memory, etc.—but it seems to me that this may be its most basic function. Narrative is a tool by which we extract (or impose, depending on your perspective) meaning from the chaotic flux of being in the world—the “big, blooming, buzzing confusion” newborns encounter in William James memorable line. In this way, it is, as Hayles suggests, essential. It would be hard to imagine how we could get on without it and still function in a recognizably human fashion.

Simply imagine trying to answer the questions “What happened?” or “Who are you?” without recourse to narrative. Regarding the latter question, it may be useful to remember Hannah Arendt’s distinction between what I am and who I am. Perhaps I can respond to the question “What am I?” without a story, but I don’t think I could do so to the more significant question “Who am I?”

Returning to Hayles, we might say that this because the question of who I am is a question of meaning rather than merely a question of fact, and, as she pointed out, the search for meaning is the primary purpose of narrative. Further, we are, as Hayles aptly put it, “meaning-seeking animals.” So critical is our desire for meaning that, tragically, it is not uncommon for human beings to sooner end their lives than go on living without a substantive experience of meaning.

One can find a similar line of thought in the work of the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, although he does not discuss narrative as a technology. Like Hayles, MacIntyre finds that being human is correlated to the mediations of narrative. “Man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions,” MacIntyre argued, “essentially a story-telling animal.” MacIntyre also went so far as to suggest that “the unity of a human life is the unity of a narrative quest.” Moreover, he claimed, “I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’”

I am basically in agreement with both Hayles and Macintyre. Story-telling is a tool, or application if you like, and it is essential to the way human beings make their way in the world.

Narrative is our default sense-making technique, in part, because it reflects our fundamentally time-bound existence. We experience life as a succession of moments yielding a discernible past, present, and future. Likewise, while narratives can artfully play with the representation of time, they are typically structured in a manner that mirrors our experience. But narratives are not merely a chronological list of all events or happenings. They are selective and purposeful: events are included so as to yield or imply meaningful relationships, establishing not only what has happened but also why and with what significance.

There are all manner of narratives or stories, of course. Some of them are slapdash and of little consequence, the little story we tell when someone asks about our day, for example. Others are more complicated and significant, such as the story we might tell about how we fell in love. There are stories, too, with which we identify regarding our family history, our racial or ethnic background, our national identity, our political principles, and our religious convictions (or lack thereof). These stories amount to something like the larger fabric into which we weave the thread of our own biographies. They frame our sense of self, and, to some degree, they provide a template of sorts for how we ought to conduct ourselves, what we ought to value, and who we should aspire to be. This is what MacIntyre was getting at when he said that you can know what you are to do only if you also know what story or stories you are a part of.

Stories of this sort also act as a filter on reality. We never merely perceive the world, we interpret it. In fact, our perception is already interpretation. And the work of interpretation depends to no small degree on the stories that we have internalized about the world. So when we hear about this, that, or the other thing happening, we tend to fit the event into our paradigmatic stories. To be clear, I don’t think this is a bad thing. Honestly, I don’t see how it could be otherwise. Perhaps this is overstated, but it seems to me that our humanity is, in fact, wrapped up with this story-telling capacity.

To summarize, then: stories shape our identity, grant to us a sense of direction, and play an important role in our interpretation of the world.

All of that said, let’s consider how our reliance on narrative fares in the digital media environment.

We’re presently living through what feels like a remarkably turbulent time. In fact, we might be tempted to think that ours is a uniquely chaotic moment. Of course, most of us know that human beings have lived through more chaotic, violent, and calamitous times than ours. What is novel in our experience isn’t the depth of the health crisis or the scale of the protests, the economic volatility, or the political instability. What is novel is the information ecosystem in which all of this and more is unfolding. Most of us now have far greater access to information about the world, and we are—arguably, I grant—exposed to a far wider array of competing narratives attempting, without notable success, to make sense of it all.

In short, it would appear that our basic sense-making technology, the narrative, is a bit glitchy, both failing to operate as we might expect and causing some issues of its own.

You won’t be surprised to learn that I think Marshall McLuhan can be helpful here. While many have found McLuhan’s aphorism “the medium is the message” confounding, McLuhan actually offered a rather straightforward explanation. “The ‘message’ of any medium or technology,” McLuhan wrote, “is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.” “The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts,” McLuhan added, “but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance.”

Digital media introduced a new scale, pace, and pattern to human communication, and, in this way, altered how the world is perceived. With regards to scale, we encounter an unprecedented amount of information about the world at large through digital media. With regards to pace, we encounter this information with previously unknown and unrelenting immediacy. And, with regards to pattern, we encounter it both in novel social contexts and in a form that bears greater resemblance to a database than a story.

I think that last point is under-appreciated and requires a bit of explanation. Let’s go back to Hayles for a moment as take a closer look at this distinction. The article by Hayles I cited above (link below) remains relatively obscure and its context was a debate in the digital humanities about the relationship between narratives and databases. In the article, she discusses the work of another media scholar, Lev Manovich, who, in her words,

In other words, when you read a narrative, for example, you are encountering the product of a series of choices that have already been made for you by the author out of a myriad of possibilities from the database of language. The countless other choices that were possible are present only to the imagination. You see the words the author chose, not the ones she could’ve chosen. You see the path marked out for you as a reader, not the multiple paths that were rejected. When you encounter a database, however, you see the opposite. You see the field of possibility and any number of paths through the database remain hypothetical and potential.

This may seem like an esoteric or trivially academic observation, but I think it presents us with an important insight into our media environment and may help us understand why our narrative technology is acting up.

When you or I read a book or an article, when we listen to someone telling us a story, when we watch a film or a show—in each case, and others like them, we are being led along a particular narrative path by those who have constructed the media artifact. They are telling us a story.

Something very different is happening when we’re online. [*Caveats below.] It’s not that we are literally presented with a relational database, but we are presented with what amounts to a loosely arranged set of data points whose significance and meaning has not been baked into the form itself. Moreover, I can make my way online with a high degree of independence relative to how I might make my way through an analog media artifact. Finally, consider how digital media transforms even the traditional media artifact itself into a kind of database. A movie, for example, is transformed into a series of snippets, clips, lines, gifs, etc., which float around independently of the whole. The digitized artifact is the artifact that has, for all intents and purposes, surrendered its integrity.

One effect of our digital media environment, then, is to immerse us in searchable databases of information rather than present us with comprehensive, integrated, and broadly compelling narratives.

I chose the words “comprehensive” and “compelling” deliberately, although I’m not wholly satisfied with either, so let me explain what I have in mind. I hope it is obvious that I’m not suggesting we no longer encounter narratives. On the contrary, narratives proliferate in the digital world. Rather, I’m suggesting that the database experience frames the encounter with narratives so that we experience narratives as just so many entries in a database of information. The narratives that we encounter thus fail to be comprehensive accounts of our experience or broadly compelling. Another way to think about a narrative’s compelling power would be to speak of it as being in some sense authoritative. (The etymological link between author and authority, via the Latin auctor, should not be lost on us.)

Let’s consider one more feature of the database/narrative distinction before exploring some of the implications. Database are tools for storing and sorting information: they are mnemonic technologies, one of their chief functions is to act as massive and relatively accessible external memories. This recalls Eric and Marshall McLuhan’s application of their tetrad of media effects (enhance, obsolesce, retrieve, reverse) to the computer. With regards to what the computer retrieves: “Perfect memory — total and exact.” You can quibble with the idea of it being “perfect” memory, but the point stands, I think.

Our digital databases are unparalleled memory machines. Narratives, too, can be understood as mnemonic devices. As most of us know from experience, we remember nothing quite so easily as a story. However, with the distinction between the actual and potential in mind, we might also say that narratives are instruments of forgetting. They select what is to be remembered, allowing us to discard the rest. Indeed, a narrative might be defined precisely by what it leaves out. When you tell the story of your day, think about how much of what you might possibly relay is left out of your telling. This, in part, is why Manovich argued that databases and narratives are “natural enemies.”

Alright, so let’s move on to what this may mean. N.B., from here on out, I’m going to use uppercase D, Database to refer to digital media environment taken as a rather messy whole. I’ll use uppercase N, Narrative to imply a traditional deference to and reliance on authoritative, comprehensive narratives.

I offer the following to you in loosely organized and underdeveloped form. Think of them as analytic gambits intended to prompt/provoke further thought and discussion. Take them for what they are worth, which, I hope, will be more than nothing.

[Narrative Collapse: An addendum.]

— Nicholas Carr recently posted a revised version of a portion of The Glass Cage, his 2014 book on automation. It’s worth your time. It opens with an exposition of Robert Frost’s “Mowing”:

— And here is Frost’s poem:

— All of this recalled the opening of Alexander Langlands’ Craeft: An Inquiry Into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts:

— Winslow Homer’s “The Veteran in a New Field” (1865):

One programming note for paid (sorry!) subscribers, the first thread in our Illich reading group will be posted this coming Monday, so be sure to look for that.

I’ve thought more than once of late about Thomas Nashe’s in “A Litany in Time of Plague,” which opens with “Adieu, farewell, earth’s bliss; / This world uncertain is.”

The world uncertain is—indeed. But I hope you are well, safe, and healthy. More importantly, may you have found your own way in these times to work for decency, equity, and justice. May we each find what Hannah Arendt somewhere called “a kind of laughing courage.” And please, stick with the masks.

Take care,

Michael