Reflections: Stories and making sense of them
Reflections: Stories and making sense of them
It is Tuesday, a week since Umiaq was born, which makes it 17th of January. I've got to the point where I should perhaps explore how I came to narratives as a line of inquiry and method. Narrative inquiry opens up two sets of considerations that have to be made clear from the outset: what kind of creatures tell stories and what kind of world is it where creatures communicate through stories? Narrative, or story-telling, draws us into a conversation, a space where our stories are shared, and the space in which the conversation takes place is what we might call a public sphere. At the same time, there is someone who engages in the story-telling, there is someone who narrates the stories. What type of actors are they? What does it mean to be a storyteller? There are of course many types of story-tellers and many kind of stories (possibly as many as there are peoples or cultures?).
Maybe it is better to begin the other way around: being human implies telling stories, being human implies making sense of the world, being human implies putting events together into some kind of meaningful sequence (whether linear or non-linear). We are creatures that like to create meaning, it is an inherent characteristics of us as a species. Stories are how we make sense of situations, objects, information or relationships. When there is a lack of meaning there is often a break down of understanding, in positions and relations. And stories change. Their form is never the same because the meaning is always slightly different depending on the mood of the storyteller, the context of the conversation, the social standing of participants, and the time in which it is told. When stories change they also take on meanings.
And in a time when meaning has, in a sense, been taken to bits, where the conversation is often pulled into the abstract, non-place of postmodernity – the kind of smooth Beckettian space where there is nothing but a bodiless voice left… maybe that is where I should start (link to discussion with Morten about time). In this time, when meaning has been deconstructed as far as possible we need to piece it back together again. That places my perspective in a certain historical moment, where meaning-making through stories becomes not just an academic exercise but something which is very necessary. At the moment it is necessary to construct common stories about who we are, where we are going, what we want to happen at this point in history. (I speak this diary entry a few days before the American Congress and Senate decides on the so-called SOPA/PIPA acts and potentially introduces censorship directly into the language of the internet, into its very structure.)
It is a point in time that for many reasons seems like is a crest, like the peak of a wave. It is perhaps where we always stand in relation to history, but our times are characterised by speed, by the fast flow of information, by very rapid developments, crisis and rupture, and it seems like the foundations of where we are standing themselves are being shaken. And it takes a lot of time, a lot of effort to make sense of what is going on. Something which for most working people simply isn't possible. It isn't part of their reality. This is part of the problem of being in a situation which Foucault calls an epistemic break: a point in time where the previously unthinkable becomes thinkable (thanks Illich). This is a moment when the future becomes uncertain and breaks down many of the things we take for granted, it kind of disappears the future as we know it. The mental, even the physical, infrastructures that keep up our expectations about what the world is like tomorrow, five days, ten years down the line are breaking down. The future seems increasingly uncertain because significant developments which reach into the innermost of our lives take place with such rapidity.
Right. What I want to get at with this is that meaning-making and story-telling provides a way of coping, a way of making sense, and there are two ways of coping and making sense. They move in opposite directions. One moves inwards and the other outwards. You can either be open or you can close down and make meaning by making simple, simplicity, cutting away, refusing to look the chaos into the eye. Refusing to integrate new aspects of life, new ways of seeing, other ways of being into your life. In this sense, I place my position within an open frame. Within one where it is explicitly recognised that the narrative, the story I am telling, the conversation I am engaging in involves myself as the narrator of a story, it involves conversational partners (so-called subjects/objects of study?), see, here we are entering into the ontological landscape which I find myself in, according to which logics I think and act in the world.
What constitutes my social reality is this two-sided coin where one side is the context of conversation, there is the conversation itself, and the other is the speaker, there is a narrator. Perhaps it is possible to say that the world and meaning is what arises in between. And let us not be… Let's not hang on to the old ideologies of positivism and rationalism, let's actually just step into this conversation taking for granted now what we expect will be the next step in conventional wisdom thirty year's down the line. There are multiple realities, we see the world differently, this is what constitutes human reality as we are all people who narrate and interact in the world. As the ultimate narrators of our lifeworlds. It is not that the story is the same every time it is told because stories change according to where they are spoken, when they are told, who tells them, of course, and what type of story it is. Stories are narrated very differently and they are narrated differently over time as well. They are extremely dynamic.
That is not to say that there is no truth content in stories, this is just to say that this is the kind of world we live in. There is a lot to gain from looking at how the social sciences is appreciating this way of thinking from different angles. Examples are social practice theory and ant, these things. Latour on the social, society. David Graber on Debt is relevant. His point is that money as an agent of exchange is an actor in our reality, which constitutes a very real entity and real force that we narrate into our stories. In the same way that we narrate into our lifeworlds our families, our pets, our, environments, 'objects' whether they be trees, lights, cars, ovens, technologies of all sorts. All these entities can be seen as part of our stories on the same footing as other living entities. And the exchange relation set up by conventional money is just one part of a much bigger story.
The crucial ontological point here is one that might be taken as a relativist one. One that ends up dissolving the world into negative equality, as something that homogenises because it gives status to everything as equally valid in our analysis. But it is not a homogenising equality that is at the bottom of the world, it is the exact opposite. That physical objects are valid in our analysis does not mean that all objects are equally valid in specific analyses. Shoehorns, for example, don't belong here and I can give a reasoned account for why not. But stating that everything needs to stand on the same footing before we do our reckoning is simply a way of incorporating that large dimension of our reality which is made up of both material (environments, objects, bodies) and immaterial (psychological, psychic, natural, living, imaginary) entities. These can enter into the analysis as being real, rather than being something that is essentially an illusion. They constitute such a large part of our lives that ruling them out in the pursuit of 'objectivity' resembles sawing off your left arm because you think chopping wood is only done properly with the right arm. This is the major shift that is going on in the sociology of associations or whatever we want to call it. And that needs to come in.
Ok, so now i've broken down… now i've started off this conversation on narratives with the ontological position and the methods (in part), because i think there is a method that arises naturally form this (lots of standard techniques of interviewing etc.) but there is also an explicit position that this research cannot be 'real' any more than it is. The content of these words do not really stand in positive relation to that stance which says that there is such a thing as 'perceivable objective reality'. Of course natural laws are real, of course those dynamics that guide our physical world are real. My position is that that is only half the side of the coin. Life is of course real itself with everything it contains. Once we cut out things just because they aren't immediately perceivable in our explanations we diminish our account of the world.
It is not possible empirically to observe the laws of physics directly in themselves: they are principles (which we gauge through the use of instruments). Imagine a physicist doing physics without the second law of thermodynamics! In the same way there are deeper principles pertaining to how we function as human beings which are not directly perceivable, yet we know about them because we express them in stories. We should not fool ourselves and do sociology from the standpoint of physics, rather we should train our ears and eyes, trace the stories that make up our personal and collective lives, and be prepared to draw them into our analysis as real on an equal footing with the story of entropy.
Stories are dynamic, changeable, never the same. Yet they convey something about what we believe to be stable in the world. They say something about us as individuals, cultural creatures, historical beings. They shape our actions and are at the same time what is left when the action is gone. This is what it means to say that humans are story-tellers. I am back at the beginning. It is perhaps time to condense these thoughts into a briefer story.
19/01/2012